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A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Birkin’s artistic sensitivity and training make him an excellent describer of furniture, machines, architecture, and even people and the broader context of ancient lives. Several members of the local community were used as extras in the film, and local children were recruited by the director to collect butterflies to be released out-of-shot to create a "summer feeling". L. Carr, and stars Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh (in his first credited role), Natasha Richardson and Patrick Malahide. This pleasant vision is countered by his rawer and more acute account of the deep mark left on a man when a chance of happiness is glimpsed and missed and left to settle in the memory. Many of the incidents in the novel are based on real events in Carr's own life, and some of the characters are modelled on his family.

A Month in the Country by J L Carr - AbeBooks A Month in the Country by J L Carr - AbeBooks

That month in Oxgodby with its kind people, warm summer days and nights, new friendships, infatuation with the vicar's wife, and a yet unknown masterpiece he is restoring, all contribute to the healing of his psyche. Shortly before his death, Dave Sheasby completed a radio adaptation of the book, which was first broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play in November 2010 and repeated in May 2012. Alice makes friends with Birkin, often coming to watch him at work, and he (lonely, damaged man) falls in love with her; but when the moment comes in which he might do something about that attraction he doesn’t take the chance. Set in 1920, the film follows the experiences of Tom Birkin, who has been employed under a bequest to carry out restoration work on a medieval mural discovered in a church in the small rural community of Oxgodby, Yorkshire.If you are like me you might even find yourself yelling "for godsakes take her in your arms and kiss her. He answered: “James Lloyd Carr, a back-bedroom publisher of large maps and small books who, in old age, unexpectedly wrote six novels, which, although highly thought of by a small band of literary supporters and by himself, were properly disregarded by the Literary World”. Adapted into a film starring Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh, A Month in the Country traces the slow revival of the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War. Gifted with excessive self-awareness, uncommon lucidity and a rare sense of humor, he speaks from the intimacy of a first-person narrator and makes the reader a sensory participant of the impact a few weeks spent among strangers in self-effacing examination, of how a tiny parcel of his history, infused him with a renewed zest for life.

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr | Goodreads

Moon lives in a tent over a trench he has dug in a field next to the churchyard, and Birkin sets up lodgings in the bell-tower of the church. Birkin is looking back from 1978 and I am reminded of Hartley’s quote “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. In fact, more than once, I wondered if this Moon, a black sheep as it turns out, wouldn’t have been a more compelling centrepiece for this story.

I look a little more and see myself choking back tears on a hospital bed with my beloved grandfather, hearing him say "I'm still your grandpa, Robin", knowing I would never see him again, but feeling gratitude for the absolute purity of the moment. But then, inevitably, as happens to most of us, first through Saturday umpiring, later Sunday chapel, I was drawn into the changing picture of Oxgodby itself. When he realises the full wonder of what he’s revealing, Birkin slows down, like a reader who doesn’t want to finish a brilliant book.

A Month in the Country - J.L. Carr - Google Books A Month in the Country - J.L. Carr - Google Books

Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times praised O'Connor's direction, suggesting it lent the film "a strong sense of yearning, as well as a spiritual quality more apparent in the look of the film than in its dialogue. To feel pain means to be alive and the resolution to pursue happiness is a courageous vow that Thomas is willing to take. Not just any woman, but one of those women that turn your knees to jelly and in the case of Birken make his cheek twitch.As a result, Carr received several letters from adults in deliberately childish writing in an attempt to secure the discount. The masked handprint left by an anonymous individual on a wall may invite from its hidden place for its uncovering and thereby regenerate another, unrelated, individual.

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