I will begin with an old story, which I have already told repeatedly in relation to this novel, but it is so good that it is not a sin and repeat. The fact is that for this novel Stella Gibbons received the English version of the French Prix Femina (Femina Vie Heureuse Prize), which in previous years was presented, for example, to E.M. Forster and Virginia Wolfe. When she learned that Gibbons had received the prize, Wolf wrote to her friend Elizabeth Bowen (Wolf had hoped that it would be Bowen who would receive the prize). "45 pounds went to this Gibbons - wrote the greatest novelist with quite everyday intonations. - And who is she? What is this book? And now you can't buy a carpet.
I must say, I gently love the work of Virginia Wolfe too - all her transparent summer weight and sleep - but I somehow am surprised that next to the book Gibbons all of a sudden becomes comical, earthly and great novelists, letters which are sometimes almost diligent than their novels, suddenly throw away all sorts of literature and remember the carpets.
What is the book by Gibbons?
Stella Gibbons wrote this book at a time when the English-language literature was still full of echoes and burps of sensual-naturalistic novels in the spirit of "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Also popular novels by Mary Webb - sentimental stories from the lives of ordinary Shropshire guys against the background of simple Shropshire nature. And still alive was, of course, a great tradition of Victorian literature, with the infinite rusticism of Thomas Hardy and the pressure of suppressed libido in sensational novels, which left a noticeable gap in the morals of the then middle class.
And here's "uncomfortable farm" - it's a game textbook of English literature. On the one hand, it is a book about storms, front gardens, farmers, dysfunctional families, and their family secrets, as well as a universal and undying desire to marry a normal rich man. On the other hand, it's a book about how it can all be funny.
I always say that this book is literally the closest to Jane Austen, despite the difference of a hundred and a half years between her and Gibbons. Osten's books - to a delightful poisonous parody of observation of the sociocultural reality around her. Gibbons' "uncomfortable farm" is an honestly funny parody of Gibbons' surroundings of unreality, literary, with secluded rain, smoking manure, and suppressed sexual desire, which was more mightily cursed from the new time-drawn soil. Lumberjacks, lovers in red leather pants, a bumpy and inanimate language of the supposedly rural people, giving not rural clarity, but vocabulary, heroines with the inner world of fucking elves - all this, then at some point missed the age of war growing stronger, is reflected in the novel by Gibbons as in a crooked, but frighteningly truthful mirror, which, however, it turned out to be frighteningly pleasant, because in any incomprehensible situation is much better to laugh than to blow on the life of the lips.
But the pleasure of "Farm" is not only in the fact that it is sincere, from the heart funny. The main pleasure of this novel is it's not so much a very modern, but very necessary to all of us the main character - Ms. Flora Poste, a nimble flipper, who hates the disorder more than anything else in the world. Flora is suddenly left without her parents, and the ability to support herself has not been so, but instead of falling into depression with her whole body, Flora boldly goes to the wonderful village of Sussex - to live with her relatives. In Sussex she is waiting for real emotional stables of Auggie, because her relatives live by the laws of the naturalistic novel, that is, milking cows and dreaming of sex. All this is presided over by the shadow of the Victorian sensational literature in the form of an old grandmother, who as a child saw "something nasty in the barn", and Aunt Judith, who has such a delicate nature that the strength is enough only for the storm of feelings, but not, for example, to wash curtains. Add to all this the muscular brothers Seth and Ruben, the legless cow, the writer of Mr. Maybach, who writes a novel about sex, the preacher father and Elfin, who urgently needs to get married, and you will realize that Flora will have a lot of work to do.
Be sure to read this book for Christmas, when, as I think, the soul is most eager to internal order and, perhaps, banal, but tiny miracles. When you don't want world peace and salvation from global warming, but something simpler - someone to put things in order around you, and coped with Aunt Judith, and made tea and finished a month of reception with champagne and wedding.