I Capture the Castle (1948)

# 22 of 100 Classics Challenge
I Capture The Castle🍒🍒🍒🍌
By Dodie Smith
1948

This story is in the form of a journal, written by a 17 year old Cassandra Mortmain, who lives with her unusual and interesting family in a dilapidated but once beautiful castle. She is timid, rather awkward and believes her life will go nowhere when she falls in love with one of the new heirs of the castle. This is not a happily-ever-after book. There is much tension as well as many pleasurable moments within the family and within their individual lives. The passion and candor of Cassandra's journal shares much insight into the twists and turns and ironies of her life, and the depth of her emotions and desires.
We meet Rose, Cassandra's older sister who will do anything to escape the families poverty; Thomas, her brother, the scholar; Topaz, her step mother, a model who enjoys nudity, and her father who is the author of a long ago bestseller whose past career profits the family lives on. Since the bestseller he has had writers block and spends his days in his study hoping for inspiration. He was not a major character but is one of my favorites in the book.
I would recommend this for its compelling characters and narration, but I did not love this.

Got to the end of the first chapter and have no desire to read anymore. I really don't get books that are written in the form of someone's journal, yet they are able to describe in detail everyone's clothes, location, dialogue, etc. in excruciatingly specifics exactly in the time it's happening. Why can't the character narrate the story in present tense without resorting to the package of a diary? It feels contrived and I've gotten to a point in my life that I don't need top finish books I don't like just because it's a "classic".

Couldn't get thru the first 100 pages. Just not for me.

The novel is presented as the writing journal of seventeen-year old Cassandra Mortmain, who is using it to practice her own form of speed-writing and learn how to write a novel. Her aspiration is to become another Charlotte Brontë. She lives with her family, her older sister Rose, her younger brother Thomas, her stepmother Topaz (an artist’s model) and Stephen Colly (the son of a deceased servant) who’s deeply smitten by Cassandra, in the remains of a fourteenth-century English castle. The part the family occupies was added a century later, and “modernized” in the Victorian era. “And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by.”

This romantic setting was leased by their father a decade ago after the success of his modernist novel, Jacob Wrestling. He has not written anything since then, and the Mortmains are broke. They’ve sold off most of their furniture and are three years behind in their rent. The rent isn’t an immediate concern because the “landlord, a rich old gentleman who lived in Scoatney Hall, five miles away … died last November.”

Then for better and for worse the wealthy Cottons, a Mother and two eligible bachelor sons, the heirs of the old gentleman, arrive from America. The older son, Simon, is a great fan of Jacob Wrestling, and Cassandra’s sister Rose, becomes a fan of Simon. I will not divulge any spoilers to the fascinating romantic tragicomedy that follows. I will say that playwright Smith’s first venture in prose fiction is a masterpiece.

In Anna South’s afterword she writes that I Capture the Castle is a very ambiguous title, since the real estate, the castle, never changes hands, by force or by law. Nevertheless, its concluding chapter cites the enigma of life as the source of human art and psychology. And there are passages that could include theology and, really, all human knowledge as driven by the same problem-solving impulse. It could also mean that Smith, writing as her character Cassandra, has captured in this, her first novel, a very tumultuous time in the life of a very eccentric and memorable cast of characters. ( )

An angsty-teenager novel published in 1940s...what could be better than that? Written in the format of the diary by Cassandra Mortmain, a 17 year old girl who writes about well, pretty much nothing and everything all at once. What I love about this book is that despite it being published in the 1940s, I read this in 2011 and was able to self-identify with Cassandra, as I remembered my 17 year old self and all the ups and downs and boy-drama of being a teenager. In conclusion, the book is mostly about Cassandra who likes this one dude, who doesn't like her, but another dude likes her, but she doesn't like him. If you're a gal who ever was or is a teenager - you will most likely enjoy this book. ( )