The name of Dodi Smith is practically unknown outside the English-speaking world, although both in Britain and in the USA her works have long been considered classics and are included in the school literature curriculum. Probably the two most replicated facts about her are:
- she is one of J.K. Rowling's favorite authors;
- in 1956, Smith wrote the novel 101 Dalmatians, which still haunts Hollywood and is preparing for a new film adaptation.
In fact, Dodi Smith is the link between Jane Austen and Sue Tansend that has been lost by Russian-speaking readers, and "I'm capturing the castle" screams to the reader about it. His characters repeatedly try on the clothes of Austin characters and situations similar to those that could be found in the novels of an ironic spinster, but only between "Feeling and sensitivity", "Emma", "Pride and Prejudice" and "I capture the castle" somehow a little more than a century has passed completely unnoticed, and due to this, a lot of comic situations and subtext are created that since books in life, alas, no longer happen, and books have gone wrong now, solid modernisms with all sorts of prefixes, complex structures and completely incomprehensible content for young ladies...
At the center of the novel is a very strange family: the father is a neurotic writer, the author of one sensational novel that has not been profitable for a long time, the stepmother is a model endowed with a bright appearance, the eldest daughter is a married simper, the youngest is a seventeen-year-old girl who dreams of writing a book, and two relatively adequate boys - the only son is a student and the offspring of a deceased maid, who was simply left to live in the pantry.
All this horde, disconnected from reality, lives in a large old castle, which was once rented by his father for the sake of his own ambition. That's just there's nothing to pay rent for a long time, as, in general, there is or buy clothes: bohemians shouldn't work, and furniture and interior items have been sold out for a long time. They would have starved to death there, but instead the owner of the castle died, and his American heirs came to England...
"I capture the castle" is a novel written in the form of a diary, and it is led by seventeen-year-old Cassandra, who knows life exclusively from the novels of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and William Thackeray, because apart from the vicar and the teacher there is no one to communicate with in their English wilderness, and children practically do not get out to London.
If we compare her with the Austin heroines, then Emma Woodhouse is the closest, in my opinion, because Cassandra has the same bird's nest in her head and an exorbitant desire to arrange someone else's life, except that there is less arrogance, because in this case it all went to her older sister Rose. Actually, due to the latter, Cassandra did not even annoy me while reading, her childlike spontaneity and sweet naivety seemed much preferable to Rose's mannerisms.
Reading the book for the time being, it seems that everything in it is very predictable: if there are two girls of marriageable age and two handsome bachelors, wedding bells will ring at the end. But at some point, the script that followed the rails of the Austin stories gives a pretty bad lurch: Cassandra is faced with the fact that the people around her are not the heroes of someone's book at all, and everything in life can be much more complicated than in women's novels of the nineteenth century.
A Belarusian girl floating in the clouds begins to look at things more realistically, learns to understand and begins to listen to herself. Of course, ironic prose does not turn into a text for intellectuals at all, but instead of a syrupy love story and another variation on the theme "he was so rude to her, but he covered his love with this", quite an interesting story of the transformation of a girl into a woman is being hatched (it is important to note here that the novel was written in the late 1940s, and the action takes place in the 30s, so the view of the young woman here is clearly somewhat refracted by the prism of the era).
Dodi Smith is very entertaining with the topic of literary creativity and art in general. There are two writers among the heroes at once, and they are in completely different artistic paradigms: Cassandra, who turns her novel into a personal diary, adheres to realism and diligently creates a "chronicle" of the events of the family, her father, on the contrary, one of the first modernists, anticipated even Joyce, for which he is highly revered in America, his novels need to be solved, interpreted and interpreted, taking into account not only the content, but also the form.
At the same time, the girl writes that she is breathing, but her dad can only suffer a book, while eating through all the other family members. The whole system of characters "I capture the Castle" is based on such an opposition, so if you take up reading, I advise you to pay attention to which characters, paintings and biblical characters Cassandra compares members of her family and the Cotton family, and how each of them relates to James Mortmain's "Jacob's Struggle".
Many readers were simply infuriated by the story of the poor and arrogant Mortmains: this is the twentieth century in the yard, and they, not even hereditary aristocrats, will not lift a finger to earn their bread, tint their faded dresses with green, but at the same time they talk about high matters.
And such a reaction, in my opinion, is quite normal, it is not for nothing that the novel repeats the fear of one of the sisters for their loved ones who have come to such a life, and draws a satire on the impoverished English aristocracy, although Dodi Smith herself hoped that the viewer would laugh at inappropriate Mortmains, but over 60 years the economy and the labor market have changed significantly, and with them the reader's consciousness has changed, as a result, many people's laughter has been replaced at best by condemnation.
Plot-wise and stylistically, the book is somewhat out of my opera, but I definitely will not share the opinion that this is an absolute dummy. Firstly, you can pick up a lot of things in a novel, that's certainly an ideal option for parsing in a school lesson if the teacher likes to draw circles-topos and system signs, secondly, it is obvious that the text has become a milestone for English-language literature, and, for example, Judy Bloom's novel "Are you here, God?
It's me, Margaret" grew out of the chapter about Cassandra attending church. In general, if you are one of those who miss pride and prejudice, feelings and sensitivities, vanity fairs and awakened arguments of reason, I advise you to take a closer look at "I capture the castle".
324.491 SRY