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    The Means of Escape
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    The Means of Escape
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    The Means of Escape
    Ebook124 pages2 hours

    The Means of Escape

    By Penelope Fitzgerald

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s short stories.

    Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most highly-regarded writers on the English literary scene. Apart from Iris Murdoch, no other writer has been shortlisted so many times for the Booker. Her last novel, ‘The Blue Flower’, was the book of its year, garnering extraordinary acclaim in Britain, America and Europe.

    This superb collection of stories, originally published in anthologies and newspapers, shows Penelope Fitzgerald at her very best. From the tale of a young boy in 17-century England who loses a precious keepsake and finds it frozen in a puddle of ice, to that of a group of buffoonish amateur Victorian painters on a trip to Brittany, these stories are characteristically wide ranging, enigmatic and very funny. They are each miniature studies of the endless absurdity of human behaviour.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJun 20, 2013
    ISBN9780007521418
    Unavailable
    The Means of Escape
    Author

    Penelope Fitzgerald

    Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.

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    Reviews for The Means of Escape

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    • 4/5
      As well as being a wonderful writer, Penelope Fitzgerald had quite an inspiring literary career; she was sixty years old when her first novel was published but she went on to write eight others, plus several biographies, receive great critical acclaim, and win the Booker prize. Before beginning to write, she had various jobs that inspired some of her novels, including editing a literary journal, running a bookshop, working for the BBC, and teaching at a theatrical school. The novel I like best is The Blue Flower, but The Bookshop comes a close second. The Means of Escape is a volume of her short stories, and I found this small collection of eight stories just as interesting and beautifully written as her novels.Penelope Fitzgerald’s fiction covers a wide variety of subjects, and she writes elegantly and apparently effortlessly about people living in many different times and places. The characters in The Means of Escape range from a small boy who loses a locket in seventeenth-century England, to a rector’s daughter in nineteenth-century Tasmania, and a group of Victorian painters in Brittany. For some reason, I always feel her writing seems very authentic and each story is like spying down a telescope for a few moments into a completely different world. Some of the stories in the book are very brief, only little snapshots, but they all leave a strong and usually quite odd impression. Beehernz, the story of a visit to an ancient and eccentric musician on a remote Scottish island, was one of this kind, leaving me both wondering what it all means, and wishing for more about these unusual characters.I liked the title story, about a young woman who helps an escaped convict she meets in church, and At Hiruharama, a moving story about a young couple expecting a child in New Zealand. Both of these stories reminded me of The Blue Flower, as they perform a similar trick of creating a very vivid image of the past and then returning to the present where all we have are old letters or keepsakes, admitting that there are some things, intangible things like thoughts and motivations, that we will never know, that the reader has to imagine for him or herself. The story that has just been read is lost in the distant past, and its secrets will never be truly revealed.The blurb on my copy points out the theme of ‘misunderstandings and missed opportunities’ in these stories. Some of the stories did leave me with a rather bittersweet feeling that the characters had missed some chance of happiness in their lives, that another person had entered their world but hadn’t been properly known or understood, and had disappeared before anything could really change. The Red-Haired Girl, about an artist and the servant girl who models for him, had this melancholy air about it. However, I don’t want to give the wrong impression as the stories aren’t at all depressing; they are full of wit and absurdity, and make me laugh just as often as they make me feel a little sad. And Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing varies so much that there are many different themes and emotions in her work. The Axe, one of my favourite stories, is a brilliantly creepy story about redundancies in an office, written in a very clever way as a report from an office worker to his manager. Recommended.
    • 2/5
      I don't generally care for these stories, but one of the better ones is titled "Out Lives Are Only Lent to Us" and it apparently only appears in the paperback edition, which includes an additional two stories over the original eight in the hardcover. For the sake of completeness, if acquiring this book, get the paperback for that reason.
    • 5/5
      Short stories that reflect Fitzgerald's style of her novels: Deceptively simple writing that captures and reveals to the reader enormously powerful thoughts, characters that seem initially simple but do and say things that leave your gasping but are never out of character. The stories all in one way or another are about power – whether between two people over position, money, sex, land; or even between someone and the nominal home as in the title story "The Means of Escape." There is no sugar-coating, the stories are tough; there is no convenient tying up; the endings are often abrupt, one expecting to turn the page but finding only that Penelope's part of the story is done. The rest is up to the reader, although how the story goes on is simple enough, if the reader has learned from Penelope to be both honest and sensible to how all of us manage to deal with the reality of lives.