A Day Off by Storm Jameson
Published: 1933
My version: Bloomsbury Reader on e-reader
This is a short book, for which all things be praised - one I'm very glad this challenge threw up for me. I've read it twice already and can easily see myself reading it again (see "e-reader" and "this is a short book"). Apparently part of a genre of "one day" novels most famously represented by Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (which I wouldn't know about although I really really should), it's set in post-WW1 London, a place of grime, buses, beauty and toil. Which yes, I can vouch for that.
It's an almost realtime experience of one lonely, unlovely, working-class middle-aged woman. We never learn her name and my word she's not easy to like, being variously small-minded, cruel, dull-witted and without sparkle. But very real for all that, and ultimately sympathetic since poverty, fate and disappointments have ground her down. So, it's a lovely warm June day and she takes a day off from her work (in a glove shop) and from waiting to hear from her lover George, travelling from her bedsit off the Tottenham Court Road to Richmond Park. On the journey there and back she has various fleeting encounters, each ordinary and yet significant in terms of a wider understanding of herself that she never actually attains. We learn (as she has random discontented thoughts) about her childhood and youth in a northern mill, her life as a servant in London, and her various failed relationships. She's come from nothing much and is going nowhere except the inevitable. When she arrives back at the bedsit there is a letter waiting from George. Whatever George says will be both life-changing, and yet ultimately make no difference to anything.
And ha, even if you're already too depressed to read the book in the first place, I won't spoil the ending.
It's evocative and haunting, yet rooted in the mundane, the narrator seeming to have as much, or as little, real knowledge of this woman as the reader. You can taste, feel and smell London in the book and I finally found out what the "original maids of honour" are (they're cakes, local to me although I always thought the sign for them was just the name of the tea-shop, and our lonely woman oh so desperately wants one). The whole 122 pages are a small snapshot of the human condition - I loved and recommend it.
My version: Bloomsbury Reader on e-reader
This is a short book, for which all things be praised - one I'm very glad this challenge threw up for me. I've read it twice already and can easily see myself reading it again (see "e-reader" and "this is a short book"). Apparently part of a genre of "one day" novels most famously represented by Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (which I wouldn't know about although I really really should), it's set in post-WW1 London, a place of grime, buses, beauty and toil. Which yes, I can vouch for that.
It's an almost realtime experience of one lonely, unlovely, working-class middle-aged woman. We never learn her name and my word she's not easy to like, being variously small-minded, cruel, dull-witted and without sparkle. But very real for all that, and ultimately sympathetic since poverty, fate and disappointments have ground her down. So, it's a lovely warm June day and she takes a day off from her work (in a glove shop) and from waiting to hear from her lover George, travelling from her bedsit off the Tottenham Court Road to Richmond Park. On the journey there and back she has various fleeting encounters, each ordinary and yet significant in terms of a wider understanding of herself that she never actually attains. We learn (as she has random discontented thoughts) about her childhood and youth in a northern mill, her life as a servant in London, and her various failed relationships. She's come from nothing much and is going nowhere except the inevitable. When she arrives back at the bedsit there is a letter waiting from George. Whatever George says will be both life-changing, and yet ultimately make no difference to anything.
And ha, even if you're already too depressed to read the book in the first place, I won't spoil the ending.
It's evocative and haunting, yet rooted in the mundane, the narrator seeming to have as much, or as little, real knowledge of this woman as the reader. You can taste, feel and smell London in the book and I finally found out what the "original maids of honour" are (they're cakes, local to me although I always thought the sign for them was just the name of the tea-shop, and our lonely woman oh so desperately wants one). The whole 122 pages are a small snapshot of the human condition - I loved and recommend it.