A Glass of Blessings

The epitome of the snooze-fest. A thirty-year-old affluent housewife/nobody is so booooored with her husband and her life that she goes in and out of churches, meddling with the non-existent lives of three priests, fancying another nobody along the way.

I'd sooner gouge my eyes out with a rusty fork than try my luck (or misfortune...) with another Barbara Pym book.

Novels like these are the punishment for my sins...

A subtle, funny-sad comedy of relationships.

Update Feb 2017: How did I give Barbara Pym 3 stars? All her books are 5 stars forever. I love them to pieces, even though I get confused about the characters mentioned across books. Wilmet's a darling ridiculous dear who tactfully leaves a lot unsaid.

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Usually I like Pym‰ЫЄs heroines more than I did here; Wilmet seems less self-aware than Pym‰ЫЄs usual, especially as a first person narrator. I simultaneously loved and hated the moment when Wilmet and her husband burst out laughing together in the horrid little restaurant; it seemed too pat, but is life really like that after all? Loved the scene that‰ЫЄs illustrated on the cover of the edition I read – Wilmet entering the parish hall for the evening social gathering to meet Father Ransome. Reminded me of the hours spent in the fellowship hall of the church I grew up in (Protestant, though – Christian Reformed). Definitely not my favourite Pym but she‰ЫЄs such a reliable delight that one day I shall reread this, even though I've only given it three stars.

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“‘Won't you at least have a drink before you go?' Sybil asked. ‘I'm sure you'll need it.'

“I refused, thinking that it might not mix very well with the refreshments I should get at the parish hall, and it occurred to me that one could perhaps classify different groups of circles of people according to drink. I myself seemed to belong to two very clearly defined circles – the Martini drinkers and the tea drinkers though I was only just beginning to be initiated into the latter. I imagined that both might offer different kinds of comfort, though there would surely be times when one might prefer the one that wasn't available. Indeed, as I approached the parish hall, which was next door to the clergy house, I began to wish that I had paid more heed to Sybil's suggestion of a drink.”

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“‘This precious blood,' she murmured, and began muttering to herself, first about her blood and then about irrelevant things which I could only half hear – a quarrel with somebody about a broken milk bottle and what they had said to each other. It seemed like a ‘stream of consciousness' novel, but I was relieved when she stopped talking for I had been afraid that she might address me. Virginia Woolf might have brought something away from the experience, I thought; perhaps writers always do this, from situations that merely shock and embarrass ordinary people.”

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“He was one of those preachers who, on coming to the end of what they have to say, find it impossible to stop. Sentence after sentence seemed as if it must be the last but still he went on. I felt as if I had been wrapped round and round in a cocoon of wordiness, like a great suffocating eiderdown.”