An excellent meditation, readers. Enjoy!
The Author as Hunter
““It isn’t like that at all; it isn’t like building—not a bit. In building, you see, you know beforehand what it’s going to be like; at least, I suppose you do. I mean, it would never do to start off building a house and find you’ve built a bridge, or something, when it was all finished. It’s more like hunting, really,” said Barbara, warming up to her subject. “Yes, it’s really rather like hunting. You start out to hunt a stag and you find the tracks of a tiger. It’s an adventure, you see, that’s the beauty of it. You don’t know a bit what you’re going to find until you come to the end, and, even then, you don’t know what you’ve found. At least you know what you’ve found for yourself but you don’t know if you’ve found anything for anybody else, but that doesn’t matter, really. The only thing that matters is that you must find something—some sort of—well—prey. Otherwise it’s no good, of course. You go questing about, like a—like a hound, and sometimes you get lost, and sometimes you find things you never knew were there.”
— Miss Buncle Married by D.E. Stevenson
When I am very tired, I default to comfort reads, and DE Stevenson is one of my favorite authors for this. Her novels are light, often cheerful, and sometimes a bit introspective, but in the clever way that doesn’t get deeply philosophical. Most often it is presented as amusing musing. She was brilliant at making her characters into very real people with foibles and follies, that you liked very much and would enjoy knowing in real life.
With that in mind, I’ve been avoiding the Miss Buncle series for a little while (ok, years) as I tend not to enjoy self-referential books. Books that are about an author writing, much less a book about the book being written, creating a fuss (and earning the author much money), and becoming absurdly like wandering through a funhouse of mirrors, as the main character muses in the first book. As you might have guessed from my tenses, I broke down and bought it not long ago. The other reason I hadn’t yet read it was that this series is, for some reason, priced much higher than Stevenson’s other books. More than I would pay for an unknown author, and even more than I’d shell out for a favorite, at least until I really needed something to read.
A Song of Joy by Caroline Furlong 