Status Updates From Till September Petronella

4. I Used to Live Here Once ***** (1976) Very short (500 words) story about a woman who follows a path known from her childhood to a house where she used to live. There, she has a shocking revelation delivered in a gut-punch final sentence.

3. Rapunzel, Rapunzel *** A hospital patient is sent to a convalescent home to recover. There she observes another patient who recklessly lets her hair get cut by an incompetent men’s barber, losing most of her hair in the process.

2. Till September Petronella **** (1930s/1960). A roman à clef story, apparently edited down from an abandoned novel from the 1930s. A chorus girl, Miss Petronella Gray, is invited on a countryside retreat by her artist friend but grows disillusioned by the snide remarks of the host. She escapes back to London and encounters various men on the way who say they will see her in September.

1. The Day They Burned the Books **** (1953) Set in Rhys’s birth island Domenica. A nameless girl is best friends with Eddie, the child of a mixed marriage. Eddie’s English father Mr. Sawyer maintains a large library but abuses his wife. When Sawyer dies, Mrs. Sawyer decides to sell off the best of the library and burn the rest. Eddie and his friend try to rescue one book each from the fire to come.

Reading roulette has spoken. Starting this modern classic. Short snappy…should be done soon.

*The Day They Burned the Books*

The light weight prose flows like breeze and carries the melancholic note quite smoothly in this story. The experiences of a white Creole childhood come alive in vivid yet sharp dialogues. The undercurrent of tension between it racial or interpersonal etches a part of you but doesn’t drag it down.

1) The day they burned the books
His father, Mr Sawyer, was a strange man. Nobody could make out what he was doing in our part of our world at all. (1)

That was on a saturday afternoon, one of those hot, still afternoons when you felt that everthing had gone to sleep, even the waters in the gutters. (3)