cold comfort redux

I can’t stop it. I keep rereading sections of this book. I finished it a few weeks ago — but was already well familiar with the story since I’m obsessed with the movie, you know, and the pre-nose job and pre-starvation diet Kate Beckinsale. And the cows. I really like the cows.

Okay.

Here’s another excerpt. Flora is going to church with her cousin Amos (Ian McKellan in the movie), a preacher at the Church of the Quivering Brethren. Flora is going to hear him preach because … well, she’s Flora and she has plans. As she enters the church and observes the faces of the Brethren, Flora has a flashback to another audience she was once a part of:

It compared most favourably with audiences she had studied in London; and particularly with an audience seen once — but only once — at a Sunday afternoon meeting of the Cinema Society to which she had, somewhat unwillingly, accompanied a friend who was interested in the progress of the cinema as an art.

That audience had run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear; and not content with the ravages produced in its over-excitable nervous system by the remorseless workings of its critical intelligence, it had sat through a film of Japanese life called ‘Yes’, made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained twelve close-ups of water-lilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four suicides, all done extremely slowly.

All around her (Flora pensively recalled) people were muttering how lovely were its rhythmic patterns and what an exciting quality it had and how abstract was it formal decorative shaping.

But there was one little man sitting next to her, who had not said a word; he had just nursed his hat and eaten sweets out of a paper bag. Something (she supposed) must have linked their auras together, for at the seventh close-up of a large Japanese face dripping with tears, the little man held out to her the bag of sweets, muttering:

‘Peppermint creams. Must have something.’

And Flora had taken one thankfully, for she was extremely hungry.

When the lights went up, as at last they did, Flora had observed with pleasure that the little man was properly and conventionally dressed; and for his part, his gaze had dwelt upon her neat hair and well-cut coat with incredulous joy, as of one who should say: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’

Will someone please please read this book so we may cluck over it like happy little hens? PLEASE!! It is ….. I’m checking …. 233 pages and just a delight! The season of delight is upon us — so treat yourself, dammit!!