I last read I Capture The Castle in 2020, when we were all in desperate need of comfort reading. This novel, though I came to it late in life, has cemented its place as one of my all time favourites -- perhaps THE favourite. Smith laboured over it for seven years and it is almost flawless.
There are so many delightful and poignant and agonising elements woven into this story -- the romance of the castle setting, the family's dire poverty, eccentric Topaz with her affected thrilling contralto and her practical good heart; the storybook romance with the painful twist; the absurd set-pieces, like when they all dye themselves green or when Rose is mistaken for a bear; the fully-formed side characters like the Vicar and Miss Marcy -- but what holds the whole thing together is Cassandra's narrative voice. In some ways she is a typical emotional, sensitive adolescent, in some ways a naive child, in some ways truly wise and thoughtful.
Someone dismissed this book as 'hardly high literature' but it's deceptive. There is actually a lot going on here, under the star-crossed lovers story -- about writing and creativity, about freedom and duty, about money and class, about England and romance.
I think I fall in love with I Capture the Castle a little more deeply each time I read it, and I'm sure that I will return to it again and again as the years pass.
I read this book when I was 20, and haven't read it since. I remember finding some of it absolutely agonisingly painful - probably because I was not far off being an emotional, sensitive adolescent myself. Another one to re-read?
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, do! It is agonisingly painful in parts, but I'm so distant from adolescent angst these days that I could read those bits like an anthropologist, and the funny bits get funnier :)
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