After I finished the beautiful and spunky and darling The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society novel I was forlorn.

(I mean, you know, forlorn for precious literary novels.)

I’m always working through a non fiction book (or six, whatever) but those aren’t books I can read at night before I go to sleep because then I forget everything about them.  And they aren’t books I pick up for a little refreshing break in the afternoon or evening.  (The Road Back to You or For the Children’s Sake isn’t exactly light reading for me.)

So when Judy Kay suggested that I might really enjoy another book with a similar sort of vibe as the Literary Society novel, I took her advice and immediately requested The Awakening of Miss Prim from our local library.

Luckily, there it was – with no waiting list at all.  (Probably because there’s no Netflix movie about it currently.)

I read it over the course of one weekend, give or take a day or two, and if I could have stopped doing anything else, I would have devoured it in one very long sitting if my life allowed such luxuries.

It’s the first novel by Natalia Fenollera and I have never heard of her but I just think her book is charming and all the other synonyms for charming.

Prudencia Prim is a young lady with specific ideals and thoughts, firm ideas and a strong sense of independence.  She takes a job in an idyllic quirky town that feels somehow modern and utopian and old fashioned all at the same time.

There her steady but untried beliefs are questioned gently and she slowly – ever so slowly – discovers truths about herself and the people around her.  Her employer is identified throughout the entire novel as The Man in the Wing Chair.

I want to tell you so much more.  But I can’t stand unraveling the mysteries of a sweet book for you – it feels like robbery.

The book reads almost like an allegory – and everything feels a little heightened as it is about more than it seems.  The characters that weave in and out of her life share profound and funny bits of wisdom and wit and if the novel hadn’t belonged to the library the pages would have underlining and dog ears all throughout.

This quote I particularly loved, although I enjoyed so many of the character’s views about marriage and inequality, about women and independence and about good literature and education.

You say you’re looking for beauty, but this isn’t the way to achieve it, my dear friend. You won’t find it while you look to yourself, as if everything revolved around you. Don’t you see? It’s exactly the other way around, precisely the other way around. You mustn’t be careful, you must get hurt. What I am trying to explain, child, is that unless you allow the beauty you seek to hurt you, to break you and knock you down, you’ll never find it.

And this one.

So seek beauty, Miss Prim. Seek it in silence, in tranquillity; seek it in the middle of the night and at dawn. Pause to close doors while you seek it, and don’t be surprised if it doesn’t reside in museums or in palaces. Don’t be surprised if, in the end, you find beauty to be not in Something but Someone.

Oh – and about marriage – this one!

I have to tell you that equality has nothing to do with marriage. The basis of a good marriage, a reasonably happy marriage – don’t delude yourself, there is no such thing as an entirely happy marriage – is, precisely, inequality. It’s essential if two people are to feel mutual admiration. …………………………..
if you reflected a little more deeply you’d realize that you can only admire that which you do not possess. You do not admire in another a quality you have yourself, you admire what you don’t have and which you see shining in another in all its splendor.

Goodness.  I could go on.

I also just found out that she wrote the novel in Spanish, her native tongue.  And somehow that makes it even more lovely in its beautiful translation.

The author herself says it is a book full of hidden clues.  Which I love.  And concur.

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