REVIEW Í JOHNS-CYCLING-DIARY.CO.UK ☆ Evan S. Connell
Ree children and husband to recede into a remote silence and she herself drifts further into doubt and confusion The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen to deflect any possible spark of conversation The novel is comprised of vignettes images fragments of conversations events all building powerfully toward the completed gro. Upper middle class woman endures rather than lives lifeThis reminds me in tone of The Remains of the Day A woman named India an exotic name for an ordinary person gets married has three children and watches them grow up Mrs Bridge exists in a timeless place it seems I was shocked when the beginning of World War 2 was mentionedShe loves her children and her husband but doesn't understand them especially the beautiful Ruth her eldest and mercurial Douglas the baby of the family Mr Bridge is sensible and understands and empathize with the children better than his wife but he is never home He is always at work giving them the best life he can little knowing that it is he they want and miss The novel is very very sad and sometimes absurd so that I laughed at Mrs Bridge's preposterous and officious manner Her conventional behaviour is sometimes hard to bear but she is human and never a caricatureWritten in small essays the story is not told as much as built up in layers as is life
Evan S. Connell ☆ 1 SUMMARY
Mrs BridgeIn Mrs Bridge Evan S Connell a consummate storyteller artfully crafts a portrait using the finest of details in everyday events and confrontations With a surgeon’s skill Connell cuts away the middle class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development underneath the entropy of time and relationships lead Mrs Bridge's th. This is a beautiful heartbreaking and understated character study of a country club wife in the early 20th century of a woman dedicated to outward appearances to decency and propriety to doing what is expected And all the while you get the suffocating sense of a person who's becoming and lost and empty trapped in the silences that mark her days It's told in a series of short chapters short vignettes really and the effect is one that builds layer upon fine layer like fine brush strokes upon a canvas The opening paragraph is a wonderful little example of those small revealing moments that mark this bookHer first name was India she was never able to get used to it It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter As a child she was often on the point of inuiring but time passed and she never did