Amantissima et Delectissima

I'm not sure who this could possibly interest, but I wanted to write a few thoughts on what I've recently reaffirmed to be my most beloved novel. Generally I write the sort of thing I'd like to read, but, this blog is just a place for me to deposit my thoughts, like loose change on the mantel.

I have no particular genre preferences, especially when in terms of what I read. Generally speaking the way I think of it, if I can sink my teeth into it like a great bone or a meaty steak, I will enjoy it. I'm trying to accomplish this feeling with what I'm writing now, and I have recently been reading thicker volumes of things like histories, or books with great amounts of detail like A Song of Ice and Fire. In equal measure though I enjoy novels like the family romances of John Irving or a veritable tome like D.F. Wallace's Infinite Jest (the ending left a sour taste in my mouth and I'm not sure I can work up myself to write a whole post about it). So why then, is the book that I've read more than any other, a brief pastoral story at only 130 pages by the name of A Month in the Country?

Thanks to my parents mailing my forgotten copy from Arizona, I remember. Just because a story is brief does not preclude it from having volumes to tell us. J.L. Carr's precisely framed story is about love, loss, and the past. And above all, art. I think if I were to quote one passage that could say the most about the story, it would be this, referring to an ages-old wall painting the protagonist Tom Birkin has spent the entire novel toiling to unveil:

"[...] standing there before the great spread of color; I felt the odd tinglng excitement and a sureness that the time would come when some stranger would stand there too and understand."

Death, the great equalizer, and art, the one human accomplishment that, with any luck, will last through the ages.

It is an easily accessible story, encompassing only a few months in idyllic Oxgodby, a tiny town in north England. Those who come into the story with a knowledge of the story's surroundings will have access to so much more, however. The Great War, and its creation of great artists and minds while leaving them husks of men (a passage from the story in which he mentions the sensation of a nearby explosion first sucking the air out of their foxholes and then exploding it back in), the impending introduction of automobiles completely changing everyday lives, especially those of rural folk, or simply anyone old enough to have experience nostalgia and the regret of not taking chances they could have, all of this has an effect on the reading of the story. Yes, despite being an easy read there is much archaeology in this story. I remember the first reading I had, an important passage near the end had me stumped.

"amantissima et delectissima. vale..."

I searched everywhere for it, and found the literal latin translation, but only rereading the novel brought me succor. Placed at the very beginning of the book, and only referenced again in the end! This is the sort of reading that brings me back. We are so lucky to have such things as books to return to like bottled time. We are able to recall them at will, unlike our own imperfect memory of such a thing as a simple summer day, with the future stretching out like a long green meadow...



A Month in the Country is available at your local bookstore, and it was also made into a passable movie in 1987 with Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh.