Word: guernsey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...literary career, is coy about whether she is in want of a husband, but several candidates present themselves regardless, including her publisher Sidney and a rich, handsome American named Markham Reynolds. The countermelody begins when Juliet receives a letter from one Dawsey Adams. He lives on a farm on Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, he explains, and he has acquired a used book with Juliet's name and address written in it. He wonders whether she can help him obtain more books like...
...this point, those well acquainted with quirk will have already recognized the fell shadow of another quirky epistolary work looming over Guernsey (don't make me type out the whole title again): Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, in which an American book lover from the pre-Amazon era forms a transatlantic friendship with an English bookseller. Hanff's book is a work of Good Quirk, the very best. But it has been done. And there is every indication that Guernsey will devolve from here into a rote exercise in Anglophilia and cozy, self-congratulatory bibliomania...
Oddly enough, it doesn't. The book Dawsey has found is Charles Lamb's Selected Essays of Elia. The Essays of Elia also crops up in 84, Charing Cross Road, but Guernsey takes it in a different direction: here we learn that Lamb's sister Mary was a madwoman who stabbed their mother to death. This kind of morbid detail comes up a lot in Guernsey, and it cuts the treacle nicely. The authors have a bracing interest in suffering and death that knocks the cuteness right out of the book. When Dawsey remarks on how cheerful Juliet...
...entertainingly whittles down her roster of suitors. But the authors show a firm hand with their characters. They even kill off a few, and the casualties aren't cutesy stage deaths with finely calculated thematic meanings. Death, in its truest, most frightening incarnation, means nothing. The characters in Guernsey may meet cute, but they don't die cute. They come by their quirkiness the hard...
...turns out, the writing of Guernsey was touched by death. The reason the book has two authors is that Shaffer died of cancer before publication, leaving Barrows, her niece, to see the book through to completion--a bittersweet ending in keeping with the dark shadows that gather in the corners of this otherwise lightsome book. It is, in the words of Lamb's friend Coleridge, a sunny pleasure dome, with caves...