Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Virago (2013), Edition: New Ed, 208 pages
Description
Mammy had her excape in her imaginary lovers, we children did not have much excape in the winter, but when the summer came there was the sun and river, some mornings I would get up at five and row up the river before anyone else had been on it, and the larks would be singing and the cows standing together in the little bays where the water was shallow, and everything would seem so good and clean, I felt I wanted to cry with so much hapiness' The first of Barbara Comyns's eight novels, SISTERS BY A RIVER is told through the eyes (and spelling) of a young girl. Vivid, funny and quite unique, it evokes the author's own extraordinary childhood. Some of the whimsical chapters: The Roly Poly Field, God in the Billiard Room, The Maids' Lav, It Wasn't Nice in the Dressing Room, As If She Had No Ears at All, The Field that Was Stiff with Skeletons, Gather Your Hats While You May, Aunts Arriving.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Ganeshaka
If you put Beatrix Potter, the Garbage Pail Kids, and a six year old Robin Williams, wearing a jumper, into a blender, and pressed the "Puree" button...well then, you would still need to read this book - because that's just the kind of funny, yummy, scary-horrible book it is.
The chief thing is, if
The chief thing is, if
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one could get a dose of Alice's psychedelic Pill That Makes You Smaller...small enough to be terrified by cows but just large enough to ride rabbits until you crush them...who, but a child, would have the nerve to swallow it? Fortunately, there's no need for such heroics. Barbara Comyns has writ the frit all down, more or les propper, and all you need to do is turn the pages. It's OK to "sound out" the words with your lips, if you want. Mammy doesn't bother about that. Show Less
LibraryThing member Kasthu
Sisters by a River is an odd little book. Based closely on the author’s childhood, the book is told from a child’s point of view (although references are made later in the book to the main character’s teenage years), complete with erratic spelling and punctuation, and run-on sentences. This
Understanding Barbara Comyns’s childhood is the key to understanding the context of this book. According to the preface of the Virago Modern Classics edition, she was the fourth of six children, having a childhood that was “both an idyll and a nightmare” (some of this is reflected in Sisters By a River, albeit told from a child’s skewed perspective). Comyns’s father drank heavily, and there’s a family legend that her father told her mother that he would marry her as soon as she was old enough to bake a cake (this anecdote makes its way into Sisters By a River).
The story that Comyns tells in Sisters By a River is both tragic and happy; tragic because of what happens to the narrator’s parents, happy because, as a child, the narrator can’t quite understand what’s going on (though, from a distance of time, she can). I enjoyed this book for the most part, but the tone of voice confused me a bit; the author used the diction and grammar of a child, yet the story is clearly told when the narrator is much older. Still, I thought that this was a highly charming book. Some of the misspellings had me laughing out loud in some places.
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way of telling the story is unique and charming, though I could see why it might get tiring after a while (probably the reason why this novel is only about 150 pages long).Understanding Barbara Comyns’s childhood is the key to understanding the context of this book. According to the preface of the Virago Modern Classics edition, she was the fourth of six children, having a childhood that was “both an idyll and a nightmare” (some of this is reflected in Sisters By a River, albeit told from a child’s skewed perspective). Comyns’s father drank heavily, and there’s a family legend that her father told her mother that he would marry her as soon as she was old enough to bake a cake (this anecdote makes its way into Sisters By a River).
The story that Comyns tells in Sisters By a River is both tragic and happy; tragic because of what happens to the narrator’s parents, happy because, as a child, the narrator can’t quite understand what’s going on (though, from a distance of time, she can). I enjoyed this book for the most part, but the tone of voice confused me a bit; the author used the diction and grammar of a child, yet the story is clearly told when the narrator is much older. Still, I thought that this was a highly charming book. Some of the misspellings had me laughing out loud in some places.
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LibraryThing member Larou
Barbary Comyns is a very unusual writer, both regarding her life and her writings. She married early and unhappily, worked in a variety of jobs, some of them rather… unusual, not to say bizarre (breeding poodles!) and kind of slipped into a writing career when she was persuaded to try to publish
As far as her writings are concerned, the only author I can think of who is somewhat comparable would be Robert Walser – they both share the unflinchingly affirmative attitude of their protagonists, who not only endure, but embrace and welcome all the misery that life throws their way. The writing of both appears odd, even quaint at first (and might remain that way to a superficial reading) but on closer inspection reveals that it has a darker undertone and a very sharp edge to it. The constant enthusiastic affirmation of even the most cruel and mean-spirited behaviour produces a subversion which denounces such behaviour and the society that produces it much more effectively than any open criticism could, and makes for a very uncomfortable, even unsettling reading experience – which, I think, is to a large part responsible for neither Walser nor Comyns getting quite the appreciation they deserve; if they are read at all, both tend to be classified as “quirky humour”, and this is a label that does not do justice to either.
However, there are at least as many differences between the two writers as there are similarities; in fact the actual reading experience of their respective works is very different indeed. What struck me most, at least with Sisters by a River, – the only novel of Barbara Comyns that I have read so far, but unlikely to remain the only one – was that while the world Walser’s protagonists live in is both mind-numbing and soul-smothering, Comyns’ protagonists find themselves just as often victims to or at least threatened by physical violence. That might be due to Comyns living in Britain rather than Switzerland, or to her writing several decades later – but for my part, I’m inclined to ascribe it to the gender of her protagonists, who appear to be all female.
As accepting, affirmative and even occasionally merry as the first-person narrator of Sisters by a River is, her life is filled with violence, a lot of it directed at herself either from her parents or her eldest sister. Taking a step back, detaching oneself from the narrative and taking considered look at everything she tells us about, this is a fairly bleak book – while the sisters of the title did live in an upper class home for most of their childhood, they were exposed to the constant fierce quarrelling between her parents and oppressed by the eldest sister who erected something like a rule of terror over her siblings, down to the colour of clothes they were allowed to wear (only brown and other drab colours, so that they would not outshine the eldest). That might sit strangely with the quirky and essentially harmless humour that is often ascribed to Comyns, but in fact it is precisely a mark of her greatness as a writer that she spins such a breezy and occasionally bubbly tale out of her misery (her own misery, too, given that Sisters by a River is presumably to a large degree autobiographical) – not, however, to gloss over them, but quite to the contrary: once the reader notices the dissociation between tone and subject matter, the bleakness of the latter is driven home as a shock, and once noticed, it cannot be un-perceived, but stays with the reader until the end of the novel and what appeared at first as quirkiness takes on an increasingly sad tone as the novel progresses.
And Barbara Comyns does make the reader notice – chiefly by way of the language which is very distinct (and marks another major difference to Robert Walser, whose prose is more conventionally beautiful) thanks to her idiosyncratic orthography. This is often taken as the narrative being written from the perspective of a child, but I for my part do not that this is a viable explanation – it is quite clear from several remarks the narrator lets drop that she is telling of events at a time well afterwards, which would put her at an age where one would expect people to get their spelling right. I think the spelling mistakes and linguistic distortions in the narrator’s writing show the wounds that the events she is writing about have dealt her, that her life has left her scarred even down to the way she is using language. It comes as no great surprise, then, that while some of the novel’s orthographic idiosyncrasies appear to be simple spelling mistakes, instances abound where an apparent error brings some hidden strata of meaning to light, placing Barbara Comyns’ writing in proximity to authors like James Joyce or Arno Schmidt, staunch modernists all.
I do not think I ever read a novel that was so extreme – moving from amusingly quirky to depressingly bleak, its language simultaneously child-like and avant-garde, the reading experience both delightful and harrowing – and yet was so very unobtrusive about it. Sisters by the River is truly a hidden gem, placed in a dark corner where it attempts to avoid drawing attention on itself, but once discovered and exposed to the light, it shines all the brighter. And I can’t help it, but I find it very exhilarating that even after reading several thousands of books one can still make discoveries like this one.
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the stories about her early life she had been writing down for her children. She had a hard time finding a publisher for that novel, but finally succeeded and it was released as Sisters by a River in 1947.As far as her writings are concerned, the only author I can think of who is somewhat comparable would be Robert Walser – they both share the unflinchingly affirmative attitude of their protagonists, who not only endure, but embrace and welcome all the misery that life throws their way. The writing of both appears odd, even quaint at first (and might remain that way to a superficial reading) but on closer inspection reveals that it has a darker undertone and a very sharp edge to it. The constant enthusiastic affirmation of even the most cruel and mean-spirited behaviour produces a subversion which denounces such behaviour and the society that produces it much more effectively than any open criticism could, and makes for a very uncomfortable, even unsettling reading experience – which, I think, is to a large part responsible for neither Walser nor Comyns getting quite the appreciation they deserve; if they are read at all, both tend to be classified as “quirky humour”, and this is a label that does not do justice to either.
However, there are at least as many differences between the two writers as there are similarities; in fact the actual reading experience of their respective works is very different indeed. What struck me most, at least with Sisters by a River, – the only novel of Barbara Comyns that I have read so far, but unlikely to remain the only one – was that while the world Walser’s protagonists live in is both mind-numbing and soul-smothering, Comyns’ protagonists find themselves just as often victims to or at least threatened by physical violence. That might be due to Comyns living in Britain rather than Switzerland, or to her writing several decades later – but for my part, I’m inclined to ascribe it to the gender of her protagonists, who appear to be all female.
As accepting, affirmative and even occasionally merry as the first-person narrator of Sisters by a River is, her life is filled with violence, a lot of it directed at herself either from her parents or her eldest sister. Taking a step back, detaching oneself from the narrative and taking considered look at everything she tells us about, this is a fairly bleak book – while the sisters of the title did live in an upper class home for most of their childhood, they were exposed to the constant fierce quarrelling between her parents and oppressed by the eldest sister who erected something like a rule of terror over her siblings, down to the colour of clothes they were allowed to wear (only brown and other drab colours, so that they would not outshine the eldest). That might sit strangely with the quirky and essentially harmless humour that is often ascribed to Comyns, but in fact it is precisely a mark of her greatness as a writer that she spins such a breezy and occasionally bubbly tale out of her misery (her own misery, too, given that Sisters by a River is presumably to a large degree autobiographical) – not, however, to gloss over them, but quite to the contrary: once the reader notices the dissociation between tone and subject matter, the bleakness of the latter is driven home as a shock, and once noticed, it cannot be un-perceived, but stays with the reader until the end of the novel and what appeared at first as quirkiness takes on an increasingly sad tone as the novel progresses.
And Barbara Comyns does make the reader notice – chiefly by way of the language which is very distinct (and marks another major difference to Robert Walser, whose prose is more conventionally beautiful) thanks to her idiosyncratic orthography. This is often taken as the narrative being written from the perspective of a child, but I for my part do not that this is a viable explanation – it is quite clear from several remarks the narrator lets drop that she is telling of events at a time well afterwards, which would put her at an age where one would expect people to get their spelling right. I think the spelling mistakes and linguistic distortions in the narrator’s writing show the wounds that the events she is writing about have dealt her, that her life has left her scarred even down to the way she is using language. It comes as no great surprise, then, that while some of the novel’s orthographic idiosyncrasies appear to be simple spelling mistakes, instances abound where an apparent error brings some hidden strata of meaning to light, placing Barbara Comyns’ writing in proximity to authors like James Joyce or Arno Schmidt, staunch modernists all.
I do not think I ever read a novel that was so extreme – moving from amusingly quirky to depressingly bleak, its language simultaneously child-like and avant-garde, the reading experience both delightful and harrowing – and yet was so very unobtrusive about it. Sisters by the River is truly a hidden gem, placed in a dark corner where it attempts to avoid drawing attention on itself, but once discovered and exposed to the light, it shines all the brighter. And I can’t help it, but I find it very exhilarating that even after reading several thousands of books one can still make discoveries like this one.
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LibraryThing member lydiasbooks
My reading during work breaks in the canteen.
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1947
Physical description
208 p.; 5 inches
ISBN
1844088375 / 9781844088379