Meandering Through

Meander away. This literary diversion is most welcome, and I am enjoying the book and all your comments on it!

I am enjoying these Britishisms (and older ones at that). Examples:

“I’d liked to seize up.”

“Rag and bone man.”

“Alienist who drinks.”

And these, not isms, but just kind of…endearing!

“Talks to himself, which I find terribly endearing as I do too”

“No chores, no gloves, no shoes, no stockings. Spying on decent people through her telescope. A disgrace. “

“I have a few questions, if you’re in an answering frame of mind.”

Fiction is “people who never was doing things they never did.”

I found it interesting that the authors show how complex people can be: where one might think one could find only simple minds and surface thinking, there will be someone who can carry on quite the conversation and delve into quite the thinking, metaphysical and otherwise. Witness the fellow expelled from the Sigmund Freud society.

Another example is the German doctor and Dawsey and Elizabeth. Since, in a sense, it was all European Civil War in that area in WW2, many instances of friendships did arise. Nowhere near all Germans were bad, and most of the regular soldiers acted like, well, regular soldiers.

The inventiveness of the people showed itself by their boiling vegetables/making soup in seawater when there was no more salt forthcoming. Interesting.

Of course, there are flaws in the book. For example, some of the daily letters back and forth had plainly implausibly quick timelines. Maybe today, with email their dates could have been correct, but not then. Between Australia and England wasn’t going to happen that fast, and since they weren’t written in telegraph form, that’s not an out.

I thought it interesting the way that Juliet softly scolded Sophie for being impertinent in her questioning when Juliet had been discreet in return. Sometimes good taste and smart inquiry are a bit lacking, even in the better mannered British society of the time [perhaps for discussion length we’d best not go into the shallows in talking about US society in this time! :)]

Back to you, good Madame!