The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
This book gets terrible ratings on Goodreads - over 1000 people on there have given this a 1 star rating. However I think this is a misunderstood book and I’d like to tell you why…
Briefly, this book is about a widow who decides to open a bookshop in a small, rural town in Suffolk. Whilst this was written in 1978, it is set in the 1950s and thematically it is saying quite a lot about class divides and the politics around rural life.
Page one sets us up for what is to come:
“She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.”
Most of the negative reviews that I see are about the fact that this is not a cosy bookshop story and that fundamentally they don’t understand why this woman chooses to open a bookshop because she clearly isn’t all that interested or knowledgeable about books. Unfortunately they’ve missed a very key detail from the beginning of the book where Florence tells us that she met her husband while working for a famous bookshop in the city and that all the friends that she’s had over the years are from her time working in that shop. The way she talks about that time in her life subtly tells us that her decision to open her own bookshop is about nostalgia, about returning to a happier time. She even tells us that she’s bought all of her start up stock from that bookshop after hearing that it is closing down.
So, if you are looking to read a cosy story about book lovers, this isn’t it.
To me, this conversation really sets the tone for this book:
“ ‘Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.’ ‘I can’t see why. Everyone has to give everything they have eventually. They have to die. Dying can’t be called a success.’ “
The other thing that I noted from negative reviews, about how boring the book is and how unlikeable the characters, really has a tone of people who have never lived in a rural community and have never experienced what it’s like. Obviously I never lived in a rural community in the 1950s or even the 1970s but even today you can glimpse that world and I really felt like I understood what Fitzgerald was saying in this book.
This book is more of a novella at just over 100 pages, it is subtle and nuanced and certainly not explicit in the way that some modern fiction is. It’s also not in your face, the bad characters who cause the strife are, in their own ways understandable and yet deeply frustrating to read.
At the time this book received mixed reviews. It was nominated for the Booker Prize (which is how I came to have it on my shelf) but many of the newspaper critics deemed it “anguished women’s fiction”. Today on Goodreads it’s averaging 3.28 stars across the almost 25,000 ratings it’s had. I’m going to add a 4 star rating to that tally as I thought this was brilliant. It’s a book I can see myself coming back to again in the future and I’d like to read some more of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work.
A couple of titles that have caught my eye are:
Offshore
Human Voices
The Gate of Angels
I would recommend this to people who enjoyed Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers. To be honest though, most of the books I’ve read with this type of subtle tone, have happier endings than this which give them a cosier atmosphere than this has, so I’m struggling to give further reading recommendations based on this one.
