{"id":82472,"date":"2015-02-06T16:32:43","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T21:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82472"},"modified":"2015-02-06T16:38:04","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T21:38:04","slug":"into-the-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/06\/into-the-weekend\/","title":{"rendered":"Into the Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"bowen\"<\/a>

Elizabeth Bowen<\/p><\/div>\n

Here are some words to take into the weekend. I have been reading a lot of Elizabeth Bowen lately, prompted first by the gorgeous paperbacks recently reissued by the University of Chicago Press. She needs no praise from me; at her best, Bowen is as unsparing and quietly devastating a writer as exists in English, and any time spent with her novels is time well spent.<\/p>\n

She is not definitely cozy\u2014despite her elegiac descriptions of homes, and her memorable child characters\u2014and the worlds she paints are often disturbing beneath their calm facades. You need to be in the right mood for Bowen, and you need to do both her and yourself the favor of investing enough time to fall deeply into the prose, and the landscape. But if you do, you will be richly rewarded.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bowen is also someone whose work stands up to repeated reading. But due to a certain embarrassing tendency to faint<\/a>, I\u2019ve been persistently unable to reread\u00a0The House in Paris<\/em>\u00a0since I first tackled it (and duly fainted) as a teenager. And as such, I must thank Suzanne Fischer\u2019s terrific Public Historian<\/a> blog for reintroducing me to what is probably my favorite Bowen quote. It is as good an introduction to her work as I can think of, and stands on its own. (Although I imagine it\u2019s even better in context. I will never know.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

But for lovers or friends with no past in common the historic past unrolls like a park, like a ridgy landscape full of buildings and people. To talk of books is, for oppressed shut-in lovers, no way out of themselves; what was written is either dull or too near the heart. \u00a0But to walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people. \u00a0Art does its work even here in clarifying their faces, but they are dead, immune, their schemes and passions are legacies \u2026 Outside, the street, empty, reeled in the midday sun; the glare was reflected in on the gold-and-brown restaurant wall opposite; side by side in the empty restaurant, they surrounded themselves with wars, treaties, persecutions, strategic marriages, campaigns, reforms, successions and violent deaths.\u00a0History is unpainful, memory does not cloud it; you join the emphatic lives of the long dead. \u00a0May we give the future something to talk about.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some words to take into the weekend. I have been reading a lot of Elizabeth Bowen lately, prompted first by the gorgeous paperbacks recently reissued by the University of Chicago Press. She needs no praise from me; at her best, Bowen is as unsparing and quietly devastating a writer as exists in English, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[5765,16946,16945],"class_list":["post-82472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-elizabeth-bowen","tag-public-historian","tag-the-house-in-paris"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReading Elizabeth Bowen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein presents her favorite quotation from Elizabeth Bowen.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/06\/into-the-weekend\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Into the Weekend by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 6, 2015 \u2013 Here are some words to take into the weekend. 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