Riceyman Steps (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Bennett, Arnold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241255791 ISBN 13: 9780241255797

Publisher: Penguin Classic, 2017

Synopsis

Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness and Bennett gives a terrifying description of its ravages. But the book's horrible situation is saved through the character of Elsie - whose life-affirming refusal to engage with the nightmarish world of the bookseller transforms the story. Bennett wished in Riceyman Steps to create an English novel as powerful as anything by Balzac, the writer he most admired, with the same sense of great human issues being played out within the confines of a household. The result is an unforgettable work which is also a gripping description of the harsh, battered London of the period just after the First World War.

About this title

About the Author:

Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was one of the most versatile, ambitious and successful British novelists of the early 20th century. His novels and short stories both celebrate and deplore a rapidly changing Britain. Much of his greatest work is set where he grew up, in the Potteries of the West Midlands. Inspired by Zola and Maupassant, he realized that this world of brutal industrial work and rapid social change, religious severity and material temptation, was the perfect backdrop for everything from comedy to tragedy. He died of typhoid.

From AudioFile:

English novelist Arnold Bennett wrote the "kitchen sink" variety of fiction--stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things. In one of his most admired efforts, set shortly after the Great War, a miserly shopkeeper marries a widow and lets his stinginess get the better of both of them. Liberal dollops of humor and well-observed characters overlay an unremittingly bleak atmosphere. The trajectory of torturous marital doom is evident from the very first pages. The listener feels the most sympathy for their char, Elsie, who is in love with an incapacitated veteran. Narrator Peter Joyce understands, appreciates, and conveys every mote of nuance, personality, humor, pathos, and angst in a reading just short of brilliant. Nonetheless, the story's gloom prevails. Y.R. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classic
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0241255791
• ISBN 13: 9780241255797
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352