The Little Girls

by Elizabeth Bowen | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 9781400034796 Global Overview for this book
Registered by lucybrown of Laurel Park, North Carolina USA on 6/26/2011
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by lucybrown from Laurel Park, North Carolina USA on Sunday, June 26, 2011

Bowen's narrative style has much in common with her contemporaries, calling to mind especially Woolf and Henry Greene. As much remains oblique, even hidden from the reader, as is clear. There were so many times that I thought after reading an interaction between characters, for instance the one between Dinah and her mother and Clare's father at a birthday picnic, "Did I miss something? Is there something more here?" That said, I do not see this as a failing, but an accurate rendering of human interaction. People so rarely say all they mean or even what they mean. Why should it be any different in realistic fiction? Sure, it leaves the reader somewhat clueless, but there it is.

The Little Girls is an exercise in the theme of remembrances of things past; how does memory and our relationship with the past affect our present. From the beginning it is clear that the childhood friendship that Dinah is trying to recapture was an uncomfortable one. Immediately upon their reunion, the three women are bickering and insinuating. In general, they are downright unpleasant to one another. Dinah while initially less unpleasant is entirely muddled as to why her former friends are so fractious about her attempt to revive the past and especially her manner of doing so. The middle section of the novel actually goes back to the summer in 1914 when the three as eleven year olds decide to bury a coffer with items intend to mystify later finders. Their relationship then is at one with the bickerings of the renewed relationship making one wonder how they managed a friendship at all, or why one of them would want to renew it.

While two of the women would be pleased to left the past remain a stone unturned, Dinah will not be let it go and finally draws them in, only to be crushed by the failure to achieve what once was. A failure that infects her present and threatens to destroys her unless she can accept the past as a thing changed forever.

The Little Girls is well worth the time especially for readers who like this oblique style. However, I can already hear the complaints, "I hated all the characters," "I couldn't figure out what was going on." I'd say to that, give it time.

The copy I have is a first edition, and the flap describes it as a comic novel. I don't know if more modern editions make this claim. If you are expecting comic, you may be disappointed. Some of the interactions between the woman have something of a bitchy-comic aspect, but overall the story is more sad than funny.


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