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Writers & Books
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bobbygw
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When I was a child, just before my father left us, he gave me a large doll. She had rather an ugly face and stiff hair you couldn't brush, but I loved her. I held her in my arms all night and rubbed her plain face with cold cream. One hand was burnt away, black and brown and horrible. Sometimes I thought my mother had
bobbygw's insight:
About the extract and author
The following is from Barbara Comyns’s novel, 'The Juniper Tree'. Bella Winter works to remove herself from her cruel mother and harsh childhood, only to later struggle as a single mother without home or job. Barbara Comyns was an English novelist and artist. Her previous works include 'Sisters by a River', 'The Vet's Daughter', and 'Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's'. 
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Scoop.it!
In the 2005 movie Junebug, Madeline, a Chicago art dealer travels to her husband's home in rural North Carolina to secure the singular work of a self-taught painter. The artist is an old man who speaks in a thick drawl and weaves conversationally between biblical verse and discussions of violence and scrotums.
bobbygw's insight:
NYRB has recently published a new, elegant edition of Comyns' 'The Juniper Tree'. Let's hope they publish all her work: she deserves a home forever available to us reading public, as the LoA does for its authors.
The essayist, Nathan Scott McNamara, also contributes at The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Village Voice, Vice, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and more. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Much of her life was spent living a precarious existence on the sidelines rather than inhabiting the mainstream. This, though, is what sets her apart from her peers and makes her fiction so remarkable. She’s such a fascinating oddity to be reading today: a writerly style that eschews artifice in favour of economical, pinpoint observations; an attitude towards women and the inequalities inherent in marriage, motherhood and domesticity, and the particular ways in which poverty affects them, that is simultaneously of its time and also strikingly familiar; and her startling use of devices that, were they to be employed today, would doubtlessly be described as postmodern – it’s like she’s a writer lost in time. With every new re-issue of her novels, the ranks of dedicated Comyns fans swells and strengthens; proof that it’s little more than a stroke of bad luck that so much of her work languishes for the most part unknown. She’s an author of rare genius, ripe for rediscovery, her novels not so much a gentle breath of fresh air, but rather a chilling, bracing blast.
bobbygw's insight:
About the essayist: Lucy Scholes is a writer and critic based in London. She wrote her doctoral thesis on sibling relationships in mid-twentieth-century British literature and psychoanalytic theory, and used to teach at Goldsmiths. She writes for a variety of publications including The Independent, The Observer, the BBC Culture pages, The Times Literary Supplement and The Daily Beast. She is also a contributing editor at the literary website and online magazine Bookanista, and teaches at the Tate and the British Film Institute.
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