Summer Books

 

“In 1937 came the novel in which Hurston triumphed in the art of taking the imagery, imagination, and experiences of Black folk and making literature. Hurston says in her autobiography that she wrote the novel in seven straight weeks in the Caribbean after a love affair ended, and though the circumstances were difficult, she tried to ‘enbalm’ the novel with all of her tenderness for this man.

Perhaps because the novel’s main character, Janie Woods, has a succession of husbands and finally finds joy and fulfillment in her third marriage, the novel has generally been thought of as a love story, about love.

On a much deeper and more important level, however, its theme is Janie’s search for identity, an identity which finally begins to take shape as she throws off the false images which have been thrust upon her because she is both black and woman in a society where neither is allowed to exist naturally and freely.

Hurston uses two images from nature to symbolize Janie’s quest: the horizon and the blossoming pear tree. One, the horizon, suggests that the search is an individual quest; the other, the pear tree in blossom, suggests a fulfillment in union with another. Janie describes her journey to find herself in a language that takes us deep into black folk traditions.”

 In 1940, at a time when women’s roles were still firmly rooted in home and hearth, the ladies of Chilbury, England, find themselves at the bleeding edge of progress as the ramifications of World War II begin to infiltrate their little town. The men of Chilbury head to battlefields, and the village choir becomes the first casualty of the war. When a female professor of music insists the choir can be reassembled as a ladies’ choir, the small community is at first scandalized by such an idea. But this is soon lost to other more salacious events. There is the brigadier who hires an unscrupulous midwife to swap his baby girl for a boy, and his teenage daughter seduces a handsome artist who’s come to town under mysterious circumstances. An upstanding single woman (a widow whose only son has gone to fight) is tapped to take a colonel into her home, and a 10-year-old Czech evacuee finds out what happened to her family. As the war advances on Chilbury, even more lives are changed when a German bomb kills a young mother as well as the choir mistress, young men are sent off to war, and spies and black-market profiteers lurk in the quiet lanes. Told in the form of diaries and letters in the voices of the female characters, Ryan’s novel, reminiscent of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, captures the experience of the war from a woman’s perspective. Readers may have come across this kind of story before, but the letter/diary format works well and the plot elements satisfyingly come together.