A month in the country
According to blogger/reviewer Moira Redmond, "This is famously a book where nothing happens." Birkin, a young war veteran arrives at a small country church to restore a recently-discovered 14th century wall painting. He suffers from shell-shock from his time in the trenches of WWI, and this had caused him to reject some societal norms and be regarded with suspicion by the conventional. The experience for Birkin is one of regret and of healing, as he makes friends in the village and completes his task. He departs, with sorrow but also a measure of confidence that he can now go on with his life.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2020–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > I have Aphantasia and I have never read a novel in my life. Even high school texts I read the summaries or watched the movies…
> What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head!
That's interesting! I don't have aphantasia but I think I meet the criteria for hypophantasia, and I find it's a major obstacle to enjoying some, but by no means all, novels. Scenes that are heavy on literal visual description are a tedious slog, but plenty of novels focus more on characters, ideas, and/or plot. And I don't find that my lacking a sense of what the characters look like, or failing to see the action in more than a vague and patchy way, is a big problem in those cases.
(I can even get something out of visual description if it's very impressionistic -- the book that comes to mind is A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr -- but of course that could be entirely down to the gap between aphantasia and hypophantasia.)
I wonder if you could enjoy a very dialogue-heavy novel, or a literary novel that focuses mainly on the inner lives of the characters. If you can remember, which ones did you start and give up on, before you gave up on novels completely?
- A Month in the Country. A WW I vet takes a job in a small English village restoring an old mural in a church -- it has been covered with paint for 400 years. The mural itself plays a role in the story, but it's mostly about the vet meeting and getting to feel at home among the locals.
