Saturday 11 October 2014

Read in 2014 - 38: Living Alone

Ever since I've started downloading free ebooks from Amazon's kindle shop, I've come across the weird and the wonderful (sometimes both being true for the same book), but "Living Alone" is certainly much more on the weird than on the wonderful side - although it does have some wonderful moments.


It was first published in 1919, just after the end of WWI, and what the war time effort was like for people at home features rather prominently in the book. Before the actual story begins (which is, actually, not much of a story at all), the reader is warned:
This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive a trespasser.
Well, it was read by me, and even if I say so myself, I think I am quite real. So, should I not have read it? I am not part of a "magically-inclined minority" (in spite of my love of the Narnia books since I first read them as a little girl, and of the Harry Potter books), but I do like the witty bits where magic in this book is described in such ordinary words that you can not help but think J. K. Rowling maybe knew "Living Alone" and was - consciously or not - just a tiny bit influenced by it.

People and places are described in a manner to give the cinema of your inner eye a good show. Conversations are often like those of real people - not really talking and listening to each other, but holding separate conversations (or, rather, monologues) each. There are many ideas about magic and reality, about Good v. Evil, about death and love and war and work, and I can't get rid of the suspicion that this is, actually, a highly political book.


If Stella Benson was alive, I'd like to ask her about it. But she died in 1933 (which means she never knew of WWII) at 41 of pneumonia. The wikipedia entry about her calls her "an English feminist, novelist, poet, and travel writer" and this book "a fantasy novel about a woman whose life is transformed by a witch". 
Of course, you can put it as bluntly as that, but this brief statement alone doesn't do the book justice. I was torn between liking and not liking it, because it was weirder than any of the weird books I have been reading over the past two or three years. It is not a very long book, so if you would like to find out for yourselves, go and give it a try.

12 comments:

  1. I might, at that. I like weird, provided it’s well written.
    Usually, I find free or very cheap books on Amazon or ibook or bookbub not worth the bother and I have stopped downloading them, except for the odd genuine offer of a ‘proper’ book by a known author (just before their new book is published).

    But I can cope with a short book, particularly now that I’ve learned how to delete them again!

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    1. Often, the free ebooks are so badly (or not at all) proof-read/edited that they are really not worth downloading. Buit I find very few, if any, such errors in the old books I have been reading of late. Most of the "classics" can be found for free anyway, and every now and then, you come across someone unknown (at least to me) whose writing style is so good that you stick to the book even though you don't really get "into" the story.

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  2. I suspect I'll never read the book but I've just been going round and round in circles because I was sure that the name Stella Benson meant something to me. It appears that whatever it was I'm not going to be able to to discover it.

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    1. Well, she did many different things, so maybe you have heard about her in a different context. Or maybe her name sounds similar to someone else; another Stella or another Benson.

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  3. This sounds like a very unusual book, Meike. It makes me want to know much more about the author. She must have been quite young when she wrote this, since she didn't live to be very old. If she had, I wonder what she would have written.

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    1. She was 27 when she wrote "Living Alone", Kristi. From what I gather having read her wikipedia entry and what I found on other blogs, this was a "one off"; all her other books were different and this one was the only "magic" one.

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  4. My local library system lets us download books onto our Kindle and then after two weeks they just disappear. Can you do do this?

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    1. Ludwigsburg's library does offer temporary downloads of ebooks, but not in the kindle format.

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  5. Now you have me curious again... Off to Amazon! :)

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  6. I was struck by your phrase "the cinema of your inner eye". Yes. That's what reading is partly about - re-creating stories from the huge video libraries that are situated in the deepest cellars of our brains.

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    1. It certainly is what reading is for me - as far as fiction is concerned, mostly, but it also happens with a well-written work of non-fiction. If an author is able to set my mental cinema in motion, then that's a good sign!

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