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Loading... The gate of angels (1990)by Penelope Fitzgerald
None.  sonofcarc | Feb 28, 2013 |  La novela se desarrolla a principios del siglo XX, en un college en Cambridge, donde un joven químico que vive en un ambiente exclusivamente masculino, conoce por casualidad a una joven estudiante de enfermería, de la que se enamora antes de que esta desaparezca de la ciudad. La manera en que la autora retrata el mundo en el que viven los dos personajes es humoristico y amable. alalba | Dec 27, 2012 | It's Cambridge in 1912, Fred Fairly is a junior fellow at a Cambridge college where exciting new physics and life governed by God co-exist in slightly awkward way. A bicycle accident makes him fall for Daisy, who just happened to be in Cambridge that day, trying to fix her life after a job as a trainee nurse in London got to an awkward end. Occasionally amusing, quick to read, but nothing to really excite or engage me. (  ) mari_reads | Mar 3, 2012 | bookeywookey | Dec 4, 2011 | Fred Fairly is being trained as a scientist at Cambridge University in the early 1900's. His rational world turns upside down when he and Daisy Saunders are literally thrown together during a bicycle accident. Fred must have been thrown on his scholarly head because he has fallen for Daisy based on feelings rather than logic. Ms. Fitzgerald's books are never easy for me to get hooked on, but when I do, I'm usually satisfied with the outcome. With gentle humor, she makes her case for a world with room enough for the possibility of coincidence and strange happenings to take precedence over scientific facts. This is a roundabout way to say that love can conquer reason. The book probably implied more, but that was sufficient to put this in my "charming read" category and recommend it as such. (  )1  Donna828 | Oct 19, 2010 | no reviews | add a review Is contained in
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Daisy, however, suffers from a very non-Harlequin malady, the sort found only in Fitzgerald: "All her life she had been at a great disadvantage in finding it so much more easy to give than to take. Hating to see anyone in want, she would part without a thought with money or possessions, but she could accept only with the caution of a half-tamed animal." Self-protection is certainly not this young woman's strong suit, but we admire her endurance. At one moment, Fred points out that "women like to live on their imagination." Daisy's response? "It's all they can afford, most of them."
Set in Cambridge and London in 1912, The Gate of Angels, then, is a love story and a novel of ideas. Fred, a rector's son, has abandoned religion for observable truths, whereas the undereducated Daisy is a Christian for whom the truth is entirely relative. The novel's strengths lie in what we have come to expect from Fitzgerald: a blend of the hilarious, the out-of-kilter, and the intellectually and emotionally provocative. She confronts her characters with chaos (theoretical and magical), women's suffrage, and seemingly impossible choices, and we can by no means be assured of a happy outcome. "They looked at each other in despair, and now there seemed to be another law or regulation by which they were obliged to say to each other what they did not mean and to attack what they wished to defend."
Fitzgerald's novel also records the onslaught of the modern on traditions and beliefs it will fail to obliterate entirely: women as second-class citizens and a class-ridden society in which the poor suffer deep financial and moral humiliation. The author sees the present pleasures--Cambridge jousts in which debaters must argue not what they believe but its exact opposite--and is often charmed by them. But under the light surface, she proffers an elegant meditation on body and soul, science and imagination, choice and chance. Her characters, as ever, are originals, and even the minor players are memorable: one of Fred's fellows, the deeply incompetent Skippey, is "loved for his anxiety," because he makes others feel comparatively calm.
Fitzgerald fills all of her period novels with odd, charming, and disturbing facts and descriptions. Some, like the catalog of killing medicines Daisy administers, are strictly researched and wittily conveyed: "Over-prescriptions brought drama to the patients' tedious day. Too much antimony made them faint, too much quinine caused buzzing in the ears, too much salicylic acid brought on delirium..." Others are the product of microscopic observation, that is, imagination. Fred's family home is in hyperfertile Blow Halt, a place where no one thinks to buy vegetables, so free are they for the taking. But within this paradise, his mother and sisters are sewing banners for women's suffrage, and nature launches a quiet threat: "Twigs snapped and dropped from above, sticky threads drifted across from nowhere, there seemed to be something like an assassination, on a small scale, taking place in the tranquil heart of summer." --Kerry Fried
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:58:40 -0500)
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I do not understand how Penelope Fitzgerald so consistently managed to pack so much into her very short novels. This one is both an unsurpassably charming romantic comedy and a meditation on tradition and revolutionary change.
Half the novel is centered around a (fictional) Cambridge college that still clings to the rules imposed on it by a (not-fictional) medieval pope -- Faculty members are forbidden to marry, and no female animal is allowed within the walls. But those same faculty members are participating in the great discoveries of atomic physics.
The other half is an unsparing narrative of the trials and lack of opportunities that beset a poor girl growing up in London. As a counterpoint to this, the scholar-hero goes home to his conservative clerical family and finds that his mother and two sisters have abruptly turned into ardent campaigners for women's suffrage.
The book is set in 1912, which means that if the male protagonist had been real, he would have had less than an even chance of being alive and unscarred six years later. No hints are dropped, however, although the author does not neglect to remind is of what is just over the horizon: "There was a vacancy in the College, not through death, but through a lecturer in Propellant Explosives being suddenly recalled to Germany."
[As a sidelight: One of the characters, "Dr. Matthews, the Provost of St. James'", is transparently based on M.R. James, the great writer of ghost stories (collected as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary). Fitzgerald even produces a convincing though condensed pastiche of a James story!]