Cold Comfort Farm (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Stella Gibbons
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Book Reviews of Cold Comfort Farm (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Book Review: READ THIS BOOK!
Summary: 5 Stars
Watching the movie is not enough. This is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. Gibbons is charmingly witty and clever. If you enjoy Austen and Victoriana, you will love this book.Book Review: Wuthering Heights meets Oscar Wilde
Summary: 5 Stars
Wonderfully witty. Imagine if Wuthering Heights were written by Oscar Wilde, and you have Cold Comfort Farm.Book Review: Very cold comfort
Summary: 4 Stars
"There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm."
That rather ominous announcement sets the tone for "Cold Comfort Tale," a slyly comic tale about a modern young woman who decides to "tidy up" a backward Sussex farm. Gibbons' deft sense of humour and entertaining characters bring alive what could have been just another coming-of-age novel.
Young Flora Poste unexpectedly finds herself orphaned, with only a tiny yearly allowance. But instead of getting a job and apartment, she decides to go live with relatives, so she can get life experience, tidy up, and make life nice and orderly. After a few vetos, Flora decides to go to Cold Comfort Farm, a "doomed house" whose inhabitants feel they owe a debt to her.
When she arrives, she finds a clan of inbred Sussex hillbillies, including her grimly religious uncle, depressed aunt, "highly sexed" cousins, a very fertile farm girl, and the crazed matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom, who "saw something nasty in the woodshed." Even worse, a pompous writer is infatuated with her. But Flora is determined to make things orderly, and so she begins changing Cold Comfort Farm...
It takes a really good writer to straddle the line between spoofery and a serious book. Stella Gibbons was one such writer, and like Anita Loos, she was happy to eye everything humorously: the idle wealthy (Mary Smiling and her bra collection), people who live in squalor and hate it, but aren't willing to change (the Farm inhabitants), and even intellectuals ("Do you believe women have souls?"). Even the livestock gets funny names like Feckless, Graceless and Arsenic.
For the most part, "Cold Comfort Farm" does seem orderly and tidy -- Flora drags it into the 20th century, sends people off to better lives, and arranges marriages, including one for her fey cousin to a young aristocrat. The only flaw is the ending: Gibbons never tells us what Flora's "rights" are, what Aunt Ada saw, or what happened with Flora's dad.
At first, Flora comes across as rather manipulative and shallow. The odd thing is, as the book progresses, we see that Flora's liking for tidiness is essentially good-hearted. Like one of Jane Austen's heroines, she does these things not just for herself, but for their sakes as well -- she wants a "happily-ever-after" for everybody, including the mad matriarch, her womanizing cousin, and fire-and-brimstone uncle.
While the ending of the book is not as tidy and orderly as I'd hoped, "Cold Comfort Farm" is still an entertainingly wry novel -- call it a comedy of improving manners.
Book Review: Jane Austens Heart + Oscar Wildes Brain
Summary: 4 Stars
Stella Gibbons's "Cold Comfort Farm" is a very intereting effort, despite some problems. The novel reads like a mix between Austen countryside prose and Wilde's cinism and desbilef, that made the book very interesting, but, on the hand, its characters are very shallow and monodimensional.When Flora losts her parents, she seeks any relative who can support her. The only family who accepts the girl are the Starkadder, who happen to live in the Cold Comfort Farm, hence the title. They are quite a family. Any of them has his/her problems, limitation and interests. Flora goes to live with than and she [can you guess?] changes everybody's lives, even the farm's.
Gibbons's prose is fluent and interesting. The story, despite its previsibility, keeps the reader interested. The characters, as I aforementioned, are very monodimensional, ie, they are more types the human beings, like, the Sad Aunt, the Naive Cousin.... nevertheless, they are good to spend some hours with. Flora, the protagonist, is the more interesting, but and she suffers some changer through the narrative, but very smoothy ones. In the end, she is not very different from the girl she is the begining.
The title is very interesting and self-explianable: in that farm, Flora finds some comfort, but this is still a cold place due to the weird people that live there. The farm can be read as a metaphor of the world and the some kind of people one may find, but even then, the author is a bit naive. Her world is too easy to live and the problems too easy to solve. Real life is a bit different.
All in all, it is a funny reading. Despite being a bit of Austen and a bit of Wilde, this novel isn't close to any of their work. Anyway, it is worth reading for people who like an easy and sometimes interesting prose.
Book Review: What did Aunt Ada Doom see in the wood shed?
Summary: 4 Stars
If she saw what we all suspect then she has been a crafty old lady playing on the sympathies of all her relatives for 70 odd years. These days she would be in psychotherapy and living on her own; however clever old Ada not only has all her meals in bed but has refused for any of her family to leave the farm even though most of them have married! This abundance of family labour (poorly paid) has made Cold Comfort Farm a profitable venture. When Flora Poste eccentrically decides to place herself with these estranged relatives she sets about "tidying things up" (obviously a compulsive obsessive)! She liberates "Big Business" the prize bull from his dank barn, as well as Elphine the sprite-like granddaughter, as for Seth and the Sukebind the less said the better. A wonderful tour de force of country characters juxtaposed against city sensibilities.