Posted by Peter Ceresole on November 13, 2005 at 19:08:17 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: PM and GN posted by andyb on November 13, 2005 at 13:37:30:
GN... ...has its moments ( feeling the way into Scrubbers' Cove for example)
Yup. That's the passage I remember from reading it as a child. Sounding, and hearing the cries of seagulls reflected through the fog, from the nearby cliff. A gripping and vivid technical passage. The rest, I remember, left me fairly cold.
As for why Evgenia took against PM... She was a fierce critic of all the books. But remember she was also a long way from home, in a totally foreign country whose language she had to learn to speak as an adult. Presumably she made AR happy, but after several years that's a tricky yardstick. Her authority in the partnership was expressed most clearly in the way AR paid attention to her criticism. It would be quite normal if she leant on that strength, quite hard. Plus she was Russian for heaven's sake.
In London in the '50s I had a Russian landlady, Maria, who'd been a young aristocratic woman who'd come out of revolutionary Russia about the same time as Evgenia, bringing the family retainer Ivan (I'm not kidding) who was still living in her household in 1953. She was, like Evgenia, an attractive and intelligent woman. She'd married a Swiss civil servant who'd become deputy UN Commissioner for refugees. Very sensibly, he let her express her energies in running a guest house in their home in Notting Hill, and in holding open house for Russian visitors. Her opinions were never less than passionately held and expressed. I always imagined Evgenia and she must have had a lot in common- and Evgenia wouldn't have had Maria's outlets in London.