Product Description

Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel about a troubled printworks in Moscow. Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank's wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation. How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican chaplain's wife? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his chief book-keeper? How do people live together, and what happens when, sometimes, they don't?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49796 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'For the life of me I can't decide how properly to respond to this book. Whether it contains a latent moral or allegorical message, or whether it is simply a tour de force of craft and imagination I have not the faintest idea. I only know that it is one of the most skilful and utterly fascinating novels I have read for years. I cannot imagine any kind of reader who would not get a thrill from this gloriously peculiar book.' Jan Morris, Independent 'Penelope Fitzgerald has produced a real Russian comedy, at once crafty and scatty. She has mastered a city, a landscape and a vanished time. She has written something remarkable, part novel, part evocation, and done so in prose that never puts a foot wrong. She is so unostentatious a writer that she needs to be read several times. What is impressive is the calm confidence behind the apparent simplicity of utterance. "The Beginning of Spring" is her best novel to date.' Anita Arookner, Spectator 'Penelope Fitzgerald writes discreet, brief, perfect tales! Jane Austen's nearest heir.' A.S. BYATT 'There are twenty perfectly competent novelists at work in Britain today, but only a handful producing what one could plausibly call works of literature. Of this handful, Penelope Fitzgerald possesses what one can call the purest imagination.' Evening Standard

About the Author
Penelope Fitzgerald was the author of nine novels, three of which -- The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels -- were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the prize in 1979 for Offshore. A superb biographer and critic, she was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, the poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers, a study of her remarkable family. She died in April 2000.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating
This book opens with a relationship breaking down, and it is an enthralling, sparsely written story, one of Fitzgerald's best. How precisely it works is mysterious, as in a sense there is very little given to the reader. Characterizations are often just one sentence. I recommend everyone to read her books because they are all wonderful, great for a long plane ride or a Sunday afternoon.

A question
Did your copy have 187 pages? If it had more, I would very much like to know how your version finishes. I and others have commented on how Ms. Fitzgerald leaves a certain ambiguity at the end of some of her works. She invites her readers to finish the story based on what she has shared, or the reader has understood. This time around, I first felt I was reading a work like Dickens' unfinished, "The Mystery of Edwin Droid". However this time it was a bit abrupt, a door opens, the reader pops their head in, and, she decapitates the reader with an efficiency that Dr. Guillotine would have admired.

This is the fifth of her nine novels I have read, and it will be difficult to top this work. Everything I have read has been excellent, so the pleasure of reading her work is just a matter of degree. The complaint as stated at the beginning is more frustration than anything else. So much appears to be shared with the reader that ultimately deception is far too mild a word, and then when you think the puzzle is complete; she adds another thousand potential pieces by bringing the story to an abrupt halt.

But the story really is quite complete. After you read what she has written a logical explanation follows. She sets the process in motion, steps back, and knows the reader will continue to follow her lead. She pulls the strings of a reader like twine on a top. Once pulled she can step back, the top continues to spin. She is as manipulative as any writer I have had the pleasure to read, she also respects her readers with the presumption they will read what she gives them, and though left wanting more, will be able to put their own finish to what she has written.

I cannot use any names, as it would ruin the piece. She produces one character that is such a brilliant fraud, that when his actions become known, his victims are left with mouths agape when they should be throttling him. As she has done in other works, she has children that are well beyond precocious and other players that the reader is routinely lead to underrate.

Ms. Penelope Fitzgerald was a great discovery for me, as I knew nothing of her or her work. She started writing late in life, and sadly died a few brief years ago. The collective work she has left behind is as good a written legacy as any writer could have left, for all who love to read.

Not my Kind of Novel
The Beginning of Spring is a well structured and crafted novel. For example, without giving away too much, an incident occurs on the first page of the novel and the reverse of that same incident occurs on the very last page. However, clever novelistic devices do not of themselves make a great novel. This is the first novel of Penelope Fitzgerald that I have read. It was read with the knowledge that during her writing career, Penelope Fitzgerald received high critical acclaim for most of her work. For me, however, The Beginning of Spring, whilst it is a well written novel, does not merit such high critical acclaim.

The novel has a simple straight forward plot. Set mainly in Moscow, the novel tells the story of Frank Reid who inherits his father's printing business and takes his wife Nellie to live in Moscow. Nellie leaves him taking their three children. She had planned to start a new relationship with a business colleague of her husband. When he does not show up to meet Nellie she abandons the children and pursues her separation from her husband on her own. The children are subsequently discovered at a railway station and are reunited with their father. The children's father, Frank, now has a business in decline to run and also his children to care for. Frank hires a Russian nanny, Lisa, who soon becomes the cause of problems for Frank.

Fitzgerald presets us with a middle class family saga. The family is placed the first decade of the twentieth century in a Russia that was in the early throes of upheaval and revolution. However, interesting though this world might seem, it was a world that was too narrow for me and did not reveal any broad issues that are of great importance.

Technically, Fitzgerald was a master of her craft. Her sentences are well constructed, the dialogue flows fluently and the third person narration rests easily with the dialogue. As for the characters they are well observed and drawn. With quiet subtlety we learn about the characters merits and demerits. Her description of Moscow is very good. The reader gets a good sense of being in Moscow, wandering through the streets and observing the scenes Fitzgerald describes.

However, the above strengths are far outweighed by what I consider The Beginning of Spring to be. Basically, it is a drawing room comedy of manners. It is solely concerned with the light hearted comic predicaments of a group of middle class people in the narrow confines of a domestic setting. This world was too narrow for my outlook and as a result the novel hardly engaged me.