How Green Was My Valley

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If you are a keen student of nostalgia and how the past is explored in literature, I strongly recommend How Green Was My Valley. I heartily enjoyed this one too and agree that there is lots of positive content as well as the heartrending tragedy.

Alongside we also see life in a small Welsh village at the time, celebrations and crises, conflict and cooperation, gossip and rumour. And while the book did have its share of tragedy (something that we are prepared for from the start for the story is told in retrospect), it also had so much more, including plenty of moments of humour and plenty that was rather heartwarming. Me ha gustado muchísimo, especialmente la primera mitad del libro, porque los relatos de infancia me fascinan. For me, part of the problem was that the serial spanned quite a long period and it was a bit home and away, meaning a snap shot of a situation and then fast forward to another time and scene.

This brought me to a familiar literary territory, the portrayal of human suffering in the face of economic victimisation of workers². Lovely writing in this story of a Welsh family in a coal-mining village (I think in the Rhondda valley area altough the author didn't specify) from about 1890 to 1910. Our narrator is Huw Morgan, a child of six and youngest of the Morgan family when the book opens (a younger sister is born later), with father Gwilym and five older brothers working in the mines.

A great deal of the book covers the hard life of the coal miners and their struggles with mine owners to earn a livable wage and the unsafe conditions they work in. I loved this book when I read it decades ago, after seeing the 1941 film adaptation (which, by the way, is excellent!

The author had claimed that he based the book on his own experiences but this was found to be untrue after his death; Llewellyn was English-born and spent little time in Wales, though he was of Welsh descent. Although Richard Llewellyn's book was first published in 1939 and sounded really familiar I don't remember ever reading it before now. Do also visit Brona’s interesting piece about the controversies around Llewellyn’s claimed heritage and knowledge/experience (I’m still counting this for Dewithon as it’s set in Wales …). A stage version, adapted by Shaun McKenna was performed at the Theatre Royal in Northampton in 1990. There's no plot here, it's a series of episodes or vignettes in the life of young Huw, growing up in a mining town in Wales.

I didn’t know a thing about the controversies so thank you for mentioning that – I have added a link to your post in the introduction to my review. Try as you might to confine your reminiscences to a specific period in time, distant memories creep up on you and demand to be felt again. There were some good performances but they were not particularly powerful and occasionally a bit saccharine.Truly the most lyrical and beautiful book I have ever read, I'll be all set to pick it up again in another ten years or so.