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Five Novels | 
 enlarge | Author: Ronald Firbank
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
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Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 485985
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 0811207994
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780811207997
ASIN: 0811207994
Publication Date: May 1, 1981
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Condition: Standard used condition.
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Product Description
Firbank, Five Novels. Part high-camp comedy of manners and part fairy tale.
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Only In England June 14, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Firbank's name is now largely forgotten. Admired by Edmund Wilson, and read by the best of his contemporary English satirists, he carved out a special and unique niche. These novels are about as close to 'purple prose' as it's possible for fine literature to get without slipping into bathos. The stories range from the sublimely silly and devious, as in "The Eccentricities" with it's striking similarities to Norman Douglas' "South Wind", to the allegorical tales that call to mind the odd quirkiness of the French novelist Roussel.
Firbank's major limitation was always a general and consistent lack of any balancing perspective or straight forwardness. His fastidously over the top flights of prose fancy desparately call for a grounding that never occurs. At his best, as in the baptism scene beginning the Eccentricities, Firbank's brilliance overcomes these limitations - he approaches the artistic level of a Waugh. However, all too often his fussiness and self-indulgence overwhelm the best interests of his novels. His extraordinarily convoluted, elliptical and parallel plotting only makes things more difficult. Sans the brilliant hard-nosed poetic realism grounding the fussiness of a Nabokov, Firbank's books stagnate. An overt reticence to call things as they are doesn't help. Way too much in Firbank ends up half-said, vague or furtive. Endless snatches of gossip and/or broken dialogues irreparably rend any sustainable plot.
Firbank wrote his later books with a fastidiousness perhaps unequalled in all fiction, writing single sentences on large cards, instead of paragraghs on sheets of paper.(Steinbeck, in contrast, used legal paper, filling single pages with thousands of tiny nearly undecipherable words.) Firbanks's calligraphy was quite as important to him as the thoughts behind the words.This gives a hothouse tone to each over-written sentence, and weakens plot-lines already streched beyond all reason.
If this sounds harsh, perhaps it's because I think Firbank could have been a much better novelist. His refusal to face life squarely may be understandable, but he never really overcomes self-inflicted limitations.
 5 fractured fables by Firbank June 27, 2005
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
Ronald Firbank, whose forty-year lifespan (1886-1926) covers a particularly bountiful era of English prose artistry, is so eccentrically individual an author he almost seems to be a creature invented by Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. His five short novels, collected in this New Directions Paperback edition, are utterly unclassifiable; no genre suggests itself when they are being read. His prose, as fastidiously styled as a coiffured poodle, as twee as an afternoon tea, is bewilderingly florid even beyond the standards of his contemporaries. With the descriptive proclivities of an interior decorator, he paints with all the colors on the palette; an orchid is not just an orchid but a "rose-lipped" orchid with a "lilac beard." England had not seen lyrical flamboyance like this since Oscar Wilde a quarter century before, and would not see it again until the ascendance of Freddie Mercury a half century later.
But Firbank's writing is not just fancy window dressing. His stories may look like fairy tales because of the whimsical characters and settings, but his narrative technique fractures the linearity of the plots by focusing on external details. In "The Flower Beneath the Foot," for example, the subject of the conversation in the first few pages is not immediately apparent, but disclosure gradually occurs over the course of the following chapters: His Weariness the Prince Yousef's mother, the Queen of some mythical Arabesque realm called the Land of Dates, disapproves of her son's desire to marry the humble convent-dwelling Mademoiselle de Nazianzi instead of Princess Elsie of England. Not until the final paragraph does Firbank dispel the story's genteel facade to reveal a passionately beating, and broken, heart.
Firbank's characters are garish works of art, most of them either impossibly frivolous nobles of theatrically exaggerated primness or paupers with pride and dignity. As in "The Flower Beneath the Foot," a common theme is star-crossed love, a romance between two people of different social stations. This love can be interracial, as it is in "Valmouth," a British colony with a climate so salubrious that the inhabitants live well over a hundred years, as well as in another novel with an evidently Caribbean setting and a controversial title which I refrain from typing so as not to have to wrestle with the Amazon censorship filter. Infatuation can also be grotesque, as it is in "The Artificial Princess," whose heroine, reluctantly betrothed to a foreign Crown Prince, unwittingly encounters the Devil on the night of her debut.
Firbank, one of the first of many English Catholic writers to emerge in the twentieth century, is comfortable setting one of his novels in Spain. "Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli" is self-explanatory, as the good cardinal, who allows aristocratic dogs to be baptized as a favor to wealthy patrons and disguises himself in the street as laity of either gender, risks being defrocked by the Roman church for his perceived sacrileges.
This is humor, but of a less obvious sort; unlike P.G. Wodehouse, who made a handsome living with his comical portraits of the upper class, Firbank doesn't target a specific group of people or stratum of society, nor does he seem interested in such petty substantiality. His fiction, insulated in a world unscarred by war and populated by dainty animated dolls, is an idyllic extension of reality, somehow a reminder of the limitless expanse of literature where formulas lose their validity and time stands still. Toss aside all your preconceptions, because these novellas will surprise you.
Best Firbank anthology out there March 4, 2002
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
Firbank is seldom considered a serious novelist, or a major literary modernist. It's easy to see why he's underrated; most of his writings are quite brief, and infused with a daring sense of high camp. But Firbank's terse narration and elliptical dialogue require as much sophistication from readers as the novels of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.This anthology contains most of Firbank's best work -- the outrageous _Flower Beneath the Foot_, the sublimely scabrous _Valmouth_, and his rueful final novel _Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli_. (Cardinal Pirelli, a closeted boy-lover, is probably the single strongest character in all of Firbank's fiction.) Even at his campiest, Firbank acknowledges the possibility of tragedy -- and this awareness distinguishes his novels from mere social whimsy. The absence of _Caprice_ from this particular collection is a bit of a letdown, because this short novel is probably the best introduction to Firbank's skewed world view. (On a separate note, the regrettably racist title _Prancing N----r_ was not Firbank's own. Firbank actually called the novel _Sorrow in Sunlight_, and his American admirer Carl Van Vechten retitled the book to titillate U.S. audiences. Although Van Vechten's gambit worked, and _Prancing N----r_ was the only one of Firbank's novels to achieve substantial U.S. sales during his lifetime, the original British title is much better, and ought to be restored.)
Great stuff. January 28, 2000
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
Some of these novels are incredibly funny -- _Vainglory_, in particular, is a comic masterpiece. Firbank had a skill for writing fools' dialogue: imagine an Austen character who always says the wrong thing at the wrong time, then imagine a novel populated exclusively by these types. Of course, this all gets a little tiring after a while. Firbank seems to have been a fervid misanthrope, and I can't think of an appealing character in any of these novels. Still, they're great, quick reads -- perfect, I would say, to pass the time while on vacation, or sick in bed.
 I love Firbank because he's not p.c. June 18, 1999
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
And he writes well. It's true the books are somewhat obscure, but so what? Firbank doesn't take anything seriously. Everything is a fantasy. You float through a world of handsome choirboys, old ladies talking scandal, schoolgirls preening for marriage. Corruption is everywhere, and no one points a finger. I think his best novel is his last, "Concerning some eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli." His earlier works ramble a little. "Cardinal Pirelli" is set in Spain and is sort of a satire of the Catholic Church. If you take certain things seriously, Firbank is not for you. But if you are open minded and would like to read something different from most novels, you may enjoy him.
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