A Far Cry from Kensington

Rating:
Summary: A Long Way From Home
Review: I picked up a copy of Muriel Sparks, "A Far Cry from Kensington" on a friend's recommendation, and I loved it. Mrs. Nancy. Hawkins, the main character is a woman that everyone depends upon and needs to talk with. She has that certain way about her that summons trust and understanding. The fact that her figure is zaftig and that she is a widow lends credence she believes to her trust factor.

Mrs. Hawkins tells her story from a 30 year distance. It is 1954, post World War II, and she is living in a furnished room near Kensington. She has several neighbors of interest and Milly the landlady, was one of the more interesting. She was also a widow and was
Known as an organizer, She was able to organize everyone and everything. Basil and Eva Carlin were a quiet couple and lived on the first floor. Wanda Podolak lived next to them. She was a Polish dressmaker. Kate Parker lived at the end of the hall. She was a district nurse and suffered no germs at all- she was constantly cleaning. On the attic floor, lived a medical student William Todd.

Mrs. Hawkins was an editor at a publishing house and in due time she lost her job and went on to several others. She was excellent at her job, and, of course, everyone confided in her. She knew everything that was going on with everyone. Like the rooming house she lived in, Mrs. Hawkins spent her days and evenings giving advice. The rooming house becomes involved with Wanda and her anonymous letters that turn into blackmail and eventually into big trouble. Along the way, we meet Hector Bartlett, a charlatan who turns many lives upside down.

Mrs. Hawkins gives advice to many and one day she looks in the mirror and discovers that she is too obese. She resolves to lose weight, and by eating only half portions and then quarter portions, she does just that. Her fine bone structure is revealed, and her new body structure also attracts many men. She finds herself in a relationship with William Todd the medical student, which eventually turns into a marriage. Thirty years later,
Mrs. Hawkins, so wonderfully happy with her life in Italy, "a far cry from Kensington",
looks back at her life and continues to offer us advice.

Muriel Sparks has been called "Britain's greatest living novelist", and she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1993 and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1996. She lives in Tuscany, Italy. An outstanding story, told by a wonderful novelist. prisrob

Rating:
Summary: Delightful
Review: In a novel narrated by a character who believes it her life mission to dispense advice, author Muriel Spark has her counsel a would-be writer to imagine confiding in a letter to a personal friend and to write the story that way. Spark has followed her own advice and it works delightfully. The best part of her approach is that she puts out some dramatic irony so that the reader is not just a passive listener accepting of everything the narrator asserts but is aware that not quite all of her advice, nor her assessment of herself, is always on target. There is a sly wit and spot-on social observations in full bloom here.

This is the story of a woman told looking back to 30 years before, to 1954, to a rooming house in Kensington, London, a far cry from her present circumstances. In 1954, she is "Mrs. Hawkins," no first name, with the heft of a zaftig figure and the tragedy of being a war widow. Everyone knows who she is though she does not always know them in return; she is expected, she believes, to hand out advice, to take care of others, and commensurate with this station in life, she is a mid-level editor in publishing. She has lots of plates twirling on sticks: her world at the rooming house, her job, herself. Then along comes Hector Bartlett who embodies what she hates the most: an ambitious but grossly untalented writer, a sycophant. The upright Mrs. Hawkins, loyal to the truth as she sees it, nails him with a particularly appropriate French vulgarism that becomes a refrain for her has he periodically intrudes on her life, a vulgarism that keeps costing her jobs. Because of Hector, her story becomes a series of reversals, from the tragic to the comic.

There are many characters, many amusing episodes, many trenchant observations going on in this book. I've been debating about how many stars to award only because Spark has outdone this book with others, including the recent REALITY AND DREAMS and the not-so-recent THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS. What the heck, I'll give it 5. I wasn't disappointed in the least.

Rating:
Summary: The Spark of Talent
Review: Mrs. Hawkins, the narrator of A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON constantly offers the reader her advice. I can't hope to match her hilarious (and in the end, thought-provoking) precepts, but I humbly offer this: my advice is to read this book.

Muriel Spark playfully and skillfully manages the plot, characters, and voice here--her sound moral sense underpinning the entire structure, and her sense of fun keeping the reader engrossed. A (literally, as usual with Spark) devilish scheme by a literary fraud is the driving force behind Mrs. Hawkins' narrative, but the evil isn't allowed to take the book over, and it certainly isn't enough to daunt the narrator.

Indeed, her repeated dismissal of the plotter is one of the most enjoyable running jokes I've ever encountered, and is only improved in its humor by its fundamental truth. A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON is wise and witty and not a page too long.

Rating:
Summary: Good Advice
Review: Mrs. Hawkins, the narrator of A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON constantly offers the reader her advice. I can't hope to match her hilarious (and in the end, thought-provoking) precepts, but I humbly offer this: my advice is to read this book.

Muriel Spark playfully and skillfully manages the plot, characters, and voice here--her sound moral sense underpinning the entire structure, and her sense of fun keeping the reader engrossed. A (literally, as usual with Spark) devilish scheme by a literary fraud is the driving force behind Mrs. Hawkins' narrative, but the evil isn't allowed to take the book over, and it certainly isn't enough to daunt the narrator.

Indeed, her repeated dismissal of the plotter is one of the most enjoyable running jokes I've ever encountered, and is only improved in its humor by its fundamental truth. A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON is wise and witty and not a page too long.

Rating:
Summary: Quirky and wonderful
Review: Muriel Spark is a writer's writer. Don't miss this quirky book with unforgettable characters that come together in a boarding house in odd and touching ways.
By turns hilarious, witty, sarcastic, and wryly endearing, it's a masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: "That glint of a thin trail."
Review: Muriel Spark is one of those writers I'd heard about for some time, and for an unknown set of reasons, I just didn't get around to reading her novels. But then recently, I decided that I wanted to try a 'new-to-me' author, and so I picked up "A Far Cry From Kensington." To my delight, I've found another author to add to my treasured list. Spark's tightly-written novel is full of the black humour and odd characters that I enjoy so much.

"A Far Cry From Kensington" is set in post-WWII England and is the story of Mrs Hawkins--a sizeable war widow in her late 20s who resides in a boarding house in Kensington and works at the publishers, Ullswater and York. The eminently sensible Mrs Hawkins occupies respectable positions in both her private life and in her professional life. At work, people confide in her--including her employer, the desperate Mr York who is madly, busily forging his way to a hefty prison sentence. At home, fellow tenants also look to Mrs Hawkins as a confidante, so when nervous boarder, Wanda Podolak, a Polish refugee receives an anonyomous threatening letter, Mrs Hawkins becomes involved in more ways than she could imagine.

This excellent novel is full of deliciously odd characters--Martin York, the publisher whose life is spiralling out of control; Emma Loy, the famous novelist who dresses in grey and insists on promoting nasty Hector Bartlett--a would-be author; Mackinstosh and Tooley--the publishers who seem to have a predilecation for employing peculiar people, and Wanda Podolak, the hysterical dressmaker who has something to hide. "A Far Cry From Kensington" is part mystery, part drama--but all highly entertaining. Particularly amusing, are the scenes in which Mrs Hawkins deals with novelists. She offers frank advice to those who seek publication, and then there are also those who refuse to listen. The insights Mrs Hawkins possesses about some of the writers are priceless. This is my first Spark novel, and it certainly won't be my last. I am delighted by her characters and her style--displacedhuman.

Rating:
Summary: Ah! That clever English humor...
Review: Muriel Spark's an author I'd never gotten around to, but am glad to have finally started reading. This is a wonderful book, a novelistic memoir whose protaganistic every reader can empathize with. While it makes the reader appreciate a world very different from today's London, the characters are in no way dated. It's funnier than I expected, but definitely has a dark side as well.

Rating:
Summary: Fun with well developed protagonist.
Review: This is a very English and appealing comedy. The protagonist, Mrs. Hawkins, is an overweight, very competent widow in her late twenties who works in publishing and lives in an inexpensive rooming house. Both settings provide their share of characters. All of these characters are quite believable, and fun to know (except for the evil Hector Bartlett). At the same time, while Mrs. Hawkins is a warm, nice person, she sees things and people quite clearly and stands up for herself. She is also a fully realized character, which is what ultimately makes the novel worth reading. My one complaint is that in making a happy ending, Spark sees fit to hurriedly make one of the characters (you know which one) a person who is wonderfully exceptional, and also a bit out of place in this novel.

Rating:
Summary: The Spark of Talent
Review: This is my favorite book by a wonderful writer. It's also, I feel, her most personal book; in a way, it's more personal than her autobiography. It's a memoir, written thirty years after the events described. The narrator, Nancy (at the beginning of the book, when she's obese, other people address her as Mrs. Hawkins. Later, after she loses a lot of weight, she becomes Nancy to them ) is a young widow wholives in a rooming-house in the lower-class suburb of Kensington. Among the other roomers is a Polish immigrant dressmaker, a displaced person, whose personal fate is connected with Nancy's. Although Nancy doesn't realize it at the time, she is herself a displaced person: rootless, alone in the world, with no strong attachments, and given to dreaming her days away riding buses all day whenever she's out of work. She works as an editor, first for a publishing company that publishes good books but is going bankrupt; then for a publishing firm that's run by some vey eccentric characters who don't even read books, but is very successful financially; and finally, for an arty magazine. Into Nancy's life comes a real villain: Hector Bartlett. He's madly ambitious for a writing career, but has absolutely no talent, and, except for when he's plotting revenge, is quite stupid. He manages to attach himself, leech-like, to a famous woman novelist. He also tries to get Nancy to "use her influence" to introduce him to her boss. Irritated by his persistent sycophancy, his lack of talent and general smarminess, one day she insults him. She calls him a pisseur de copie. He goes berserk with rage, and puts in motion a devious scheme to get even with her. His revenge is so petty that it would be laughable, except for the fact that it ends in real tragedy for one of the other characters. Nancy, however, refuses to be a victim. To say more would be to give away the ending. This being a Muriel Spark book, there's a strong undercurrent of the supernatural throughout. Is the pisseur de copie really a diabolical agent, or jus a vicious human being? (Myrna Loy once told Samuel Goldwyn that she ddn't want to work with director William Wyler because she'd heard he was a sadist. "No, he's not," Goldwyn replied. "He's just a very mean fellow!") As always, she leaves it for the reader to decide. There's also some good, clean, dirty fun for the reader: trying to identify the reprehensible woman novelist (she tries, quite determinedly, and with malice aforethought, to pry the pisseur leech off herself and attach him to Nancy. When Nancy refuses to capitulate, the novelist has Nancy fired from two jobs.) I won't name my candidate, even though she went on to her reward a few years ago. Suffice it to say that any reader who is willing to do a little research should be able to figure it out. One of the things that struck me about this book is that it gives us that rarity of rarities in modern fiction, a lovable heroine. Intelligent, kind and gentle. Observant and witty, but not malicious. The only peson Nancy truly dislikes is the pisseur de copie, and he turns out to be even worse than she thought. "A Far Cry From Kensington" is Muriel spark at her whimsical - and wistful - best. I think that it will touch anyone who has ever been young and alone in the world.

Rating:
Summary: No half portions here - read in full
Review: This is one of those books that cannot described in a nutshell. If you had to hazard a guess at a description, you'd have to place it firmly in the comedy/ tragedy/ drama/ mystery/ romance section, or simply file it under Spark: Muriel in the Classics section.

Narrated by the once round and central character, Agnes Hawkins (a.k.a. Mrs. Hawkins or Nancy), the story revolves around her experiences as a young widow living in furnished rooms in a semi-detached building in South Kensington. She colorfully describes her neighbors and acquaintances, and gives us tantalizing glimpses into their little secret worlds, in which she is a trustee and confidante.

Despite the mysterious black boxes and the lurking threat of enemies, known and unknown, our heroine manages to keep her head above water, remains a pillar of strength and finds true love among the rubble. Thanks to her diet plan (freely given to the reader as a bonus for purchasing the book), she gains new self-respect, and reinvents herself in a new country, a far cry from her humble beginnings.

A simple classic by an inspired writer.

^AR