An audio book. 5 chatty stories.
In “Sister Flora’s First Day Of Freedom” a young Catholic nun comes into money and decides to leave the nunnery to chastely find a man in Edinburgh. After a slow and shallow start, it doesn't improve. Maybe it's a pastiche of an old style. I decided to continue reading.
“Angels In Italy” - a shy boy who made a girl pregnant at 16 in 1936 meets her again when they're 48. She's a widow and grandmother. He's become a famous artist. Predictable plot. It doesn't work for me.
"Dear ventriloquist" - Eddie, from a good home in Canada, becomes a magician at a circus. He stands in for the doll of a female ventriloquist, but she puts no words into his mouth. She marries someone else. He happily marries too. The End.
"The woman with the beautiful car" - A father retires, hoping his son will take over the little village school, but he misses university life in Dublin. He sees a girl he likes. He uses a cunning ruse to meet her. "It was almost as if the decision to act was being made by someone else altogether, some agency, some other presence that was within him operating through his mind but at the same time nothing to do with him. This, he thought, is how it must feel to be possessed, to be aware that what you did was the act of something, some other person within you that was not the real self, not the self that looked out at the world through your eyes when you woke each morning, that accompanied you through the day, that experienced and remembered the things that happened to you". I quote this to show how wordy the narrators can be. The couple end up marrying, settling down locally. The predictable punchline is that she knew about the ruse. That's it.
“He Wanted To Believe In Tenderness” - David, a little son of mining-village Australians watches his parents fall out. He goes to university to study engineering. He meets a Jewish girl, Hannah. Before completing his degree he joins the army and ends up a PoW in a Japanese camp. Hannah waits and they marry. Hannah, soon after having a child, Rachel, goes off with someone else. Years later, after Rachel lost the use of her legs, they live together again for the rest of their lives.
Women often take the lead in these stories, being prepared to wait/propose.
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