Letty Fox Her Luck Stead Christina 9780571259038 Books
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You can't help liking Letty Fox. She is the eponymous hero of this novel, and what a big, energetic, sprawling novel it is. Letty Fox, with brio and relish, describes her picaresque adventures in the New York and London of the 1930s and 1940s. She is surrounded by a family notable for its size, eccentricity and marital irregularities. Letty herself has many affairs but finds marriage elusive. Bizarre, satirical and imaginative, first published in 1947, this powerful portrayal of a woman who might have been independent but chose otherwise stands as one of Christina Stead's most impressive works. Christina Stead is much more than the author of "The Man Who Loved Children". To remind readers forcefully of this, "Faber Finds" is reissuing nine of her works "The Beauties and Furies", "For Love Alone", "House of All Nations", "Letty Fox Her Luck", "A Little Tea", "A Little Chat", "Miss Herbert", "The People with Dogs", "The Puzzleheaded Girl" and "The Salzburg Tales".
Letty Fox Her Luck Stead Christina 9780571259038 Books
Many rate Christina Stead among the finest modern writers of the century, and there's almost no denying her skill with shaping a beautiful sentence. Unfortunately, Stead has trouble sometimes shaping a good novel--she tends to go and on--, and this deficiency is largely at work in what many consider her second-best work (after THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN), LETTY FOX: HER LUCK.Letty is a young woman in Manhattan living during wartime largely by her wits, and the beginning twenty pages--detailing her move into a new apartment in the Village--is so marvelous that your readerly expectations become raised to a very high degree. Stead dashes them, however, once you move to her life's narrative, which mostly details a series of women in her extended family depending on men for both money and affection, and doing nearly everything they can think of doing to acquire these things. Some of her ideas are brilliant, and the sentences read gorgeously--but you keep wishing for someone to step in and cut all the repetitions. Readers may find their patience tried by the 600-some pages of very little action, and yet Letty herself remains a very memorable achievement, an addition to a gallery of heroines of such questionable scruples as Defoe's Moll Flanders or Cary's Sarah Monday.
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Tags : Letty Fox: Her Luck [Stead Christina] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. You can't help liking Letty Fox. She is the eponymous hero of this novel, and what a big, energetic, sprawling novel it is. Letty Fox,Stead Christina,Letty Fox: Her Luck,Faber and Faber,0571259030,Fiction Literary,General & Literary Fiction,Religious & spiritual fiction
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Letty Fox Her Luck Stead Christina 9780571259038 Books Reviews
Seurat, Pissaro, and Van Gogh painted pictures made up of points of color---seen too closely, they look just like a bunch of dots, without much meaning. Step back and you see a sophisticated landscape or portrait. These were the pointillistes of French Impressionist art. As I read this penetrating character study constructed of 517 pages of trivia, banal conversations, epigrams, and thoughts, I thought over and over that this novel resembled more than a little a pointilliste painting. Any one page seems trivial and even directionless. As you continue, you realize that a powerful portrait is being built. There is no plot except the life of Letty Fox, a strong young woman whose licentious, impecunious, immature/mature ways stem from her own dysfunctional family background of similar qualities. It is a coming of age tale that takes place from the mid-1920s to 1945 in New York, New Jersey, and (occasionally) England and France in a welter of bizarre characters. Letty Fox is the kind of person who, in real life, never writes her autobiography, or if she does, writes in a most self-aggrandizing manner. She longs for romance but gets mostly men interested in one-night stands, for marriage to a wealthy man, but most of them skip town, for interesting work but she tires of a job quickly, for a normal family (but does such an animal exist ? I think Stead would say no.) Letty Fox is in love with life, but unlike some of her leftwing friends, she is more realistic. She samples whatever she can, but chooses very little. Contradictions abound. Freedom vs marriage. Sex vs. love. Friends vs. living alone. Idealism vs. cynicism. Above all, Letty is a feminist, though she never refers to herself in such terms.. She refuses to kowtow to current prejudices, yet revels in modern New York life as much as she can. You can pick out hundreds of quotations like the following to express her feelings
"I sometimes wondered at the infinite distance between the state of not being married---and whatever the gradation of not being married, it made no difference---and the state of being married. How did people bridge the gap ? It seemed to happen to others---most others never to me; and I thought it very peculiar. I couldn't figure it out; perhaps I was too young, anyway; but it savored to me of magic, and I felt very miserable that in this modern world something so primary, this first of all things to a woman, smacked so strongly of the tribal priest, the smoky cult, the tom-tom, the blood sacrifice, the hidden mystery. It didn't seem fair. We should have abolished all that with enlightenment." p.413-14
"I was born to live with all the ardor of my blood and to mate and breed, and laugh at my grandchildren. These monastic notions were not for me." (rejects sacrificial fantasies, rejects ideals of doing good) p.419
"What is the use of a man if one can't be forthright with him ? I would never hedge and plot with a man, thought I." p.489
While Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children" focusses on a man and family relations, LFHL is firmly about one woman and the slow transformation of her connection to family, friends, the world of work, and the world of sex and romance. It's not an easy read, because at times you feel you are not getting anywhere. Perhaps it could have been cut down, but then again, maybe the repetitiveness is an integral part of the whole picture. You have to keep your mind on that picture, not the myriad of dots. If you do, you'll find a most interesting novel, like Letty Fox herself, not at all average.
Can Letty Fox be called a heroine as I have referred to her in my title?
From the first page of this 517 page story, Letty is paraded in all her flaws. It should be mentioned her flaws are abundant indeed. She's an unreliable narrator, a liar, scammer, superficial butterfly, nasty, backstabbing. She pleads, wheedles, manipulates to get her way but she is also fascinatingly endearing. I imagine Letty Fox would have been a shocking story when it was first released in 1947 with Letty's matter-of-fact descriptions of her casual relationships and sexual liaisons, There is a train wreck quality to the story of Letty as she goes about her life, trying to find a relationship that sticks but for all her bitchiness, I couldn't help but sympathise with her predicaments and hardships.
Christina Stead is a writer of bittersweet stories set against a backdrop of everyday life. One can't help but be tainted with a streak of pessimism reading her stories but she goes so deeply into her characters that she can only be admired. Letty Fox was the second book I had read written by Christina Stead (the other being The Man Who Loved Children) and I will definitely read more stories by this writer. I am puzzled why she is not more widely read.
I highly recommend Letty Fox to someone who likes a large story with richly painted characters.
This long, drawn out story about nothing more than how to get married from age 16 all the way up to 30 was more than boring and self absorbed!
Many rate Christina Stead among the finest modern writers of the century, and there's almost no denying her skill with shaping a beautiful sentence. Unfortunately, Stead has trouble sometimes shaping a good novel--she tends to go and on--, and this deficiency is largely at work in what many consider her second-best work (after THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN), LETTY FOX HER LUCK.
Letty is a young woman in Manhattan living during wartime largely by her wits, and the beginning twenty pages--detailing her move into a new apartment in the Village--is so marvelous that your readerly expectations become raised to a very high degree. Stead dashes them, however, once you move to her life's narrative, which mostly details a series of women in her extended family depending on men for both money and affection, and doing nearly everything they can think of doing to acquire these things. Some of her ideas are brilliant, and the sentences read gorgeously--but you keep wishing for someone to step in and cut all the repetitions. Readers may find their patience tried by the 600-some pages of very little action, and yet Letty herself remains a very memorable achievement, an addition to a gallery of heroines of such questionable scruples as Defoe's Moll Flanders or Cary's Sarah Monday.
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