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Title: Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood, Honor Moore ISBN: 1-59017-007-5 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: August, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Dark, grimly funny novella
Comment: Great Granny Webster is a short, pointed look at three generations of eccentric, damaged women from the point of view of their descendant, a young girl. The portraits of the rigid, determinedly unhappy Great Granny Webster, her flighty, insane daughter, and the outwardly frivolous but suicidal granddaughter are classic black comedy, amusing and depressing together. The women dominate the story; the men are either dead (the narrator's father), absent (her brother), or ineffectual (her grandfather). The book is short, but the characters are affecting and vividly portrayed.
Rating: 1
Summary: Not worth a re-issue
Comment: NYRB Classics was started a few years ago with the intention of re-issuing neglected cult favorite books which had fallen out of print; though many of their choices have been superb, a very few leave you scratching your head, wondering who is making the choices.
GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER is one such choice. By all accounts, Caroline Blackwood was a fascinating woman: heriess to the Guinness fortune, she counted among her [physical] conquests Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell, and was a bewitching raconteur and bon vivant. But she wasn't much of a writer. Blackwood seemed never to have learned the lesson that a good fiction writer must show rather than tell. As a result, in this novel she tells us and tells us and tells us again what a monster the title character is, but Great-Granny Webster herself doesn't actually do much but sit around and show poor hospitality to her guests and relations. Yet still the narrator keeps fulminating against her for crimes mostly implied rather than real; as in Caroline Blackwood's final book, THE LAST OF THE DUCHESS, where she simultaneously weighed in again and again against the Duchess of Windsor's female lawyer, you begin to develop a perverse sympathy for the object of Blackwood's fury.
Even had this book accomplished what it set out to do it wouldn't have been much: the two main characters, Great-Granny Webster and Aunt Lavinia, seem like nothing readers haven't already seen (respectively) in Dickens and Evelyn Waugh.
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Title: Corrigan by Caroline Blackwood, Andrew Solomon ISBN: 1590170067 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger ISBN: 0306811871 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: We Always Treat Women Too Well (New York Review Books Classics) by Raymond Queneau, Barbara Wright, John Updike ISBN: 159017030X Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau, Barbara Wright ISBN: 1590170318 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Any Human Heart by William Boyd ISBN: 0375414932 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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