I ended up spending a lot of time on the wikipedia page for this one because as I read I wanted to understand better what was going on. Not the plot, which is relatively simple, but the behind the scenes kind of stuff that I clearly wasn’t understanding. This book is a satire of a minor “literary” or kind of hack writing subgenre of the bucolic/pastoral British novel. Specifically the highly sentimental treacly kind of nonsense that probably doesn’t exist nearly as much these days. Well, to be fair, there are still books like this, but the specific subgenre that Stella Gibbons saw fit to satirize probably hasn’t stuck around. And in addition to this, I haven’t read any of them. So I found my reading of this to be pretty lacking because I felt like I didn’t get the joke.
So I was an outsider looking in on this one. The book involves a young woman who on the death of her parents with whom she didn’t have much of a relationship moves out to the country to work on a dying family farm of distant relatives. She finds the kinds of weird figures, strange occurrences, and other fish out of water type things you’d imagine she would.Oddly, the book takes place “in the future” and so there’s vague futurist references to what she presumes will be happening in politics, current events, and technology in the 20 or so years after the setting.
I tried to read this a few years ago and couldn’t get into and I thought a few more years of British reading would do something about that, and well I guess it didn’t.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Classics-Comfort-Stella-Gibbons/dp/B00DIKV51W/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=cold+comfort+farm&qid=1558880624&s=books&sr=1-5)
