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The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (New York Review Books Classics) |  | Author: G.B. Edwards
Creator: John Fowles
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy Used: $5.95
as of 9/3/2010 08:14 PDT details
You Save: $11.00 (65%)
Seller: Readerstoreaders10
Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 104991
Media: Paperback
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 1590172337
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781590172339
ASIN: 1590172337
Publication Date: July 10, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781590172339 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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Product Description
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.
G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph
of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.
"Imagine a weekend spent in deep conversation with a superb old man, a crusty, intelligent, passionate and individualistic character at the peak of his powers as a raconteur, and you will have a very good ideas of the impact of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page...It amuses, it entertains, it moves us...” –The Washington Post
"A true epic, as sexy as it is hilarious, it seems drenched with the harsh tidal beauties of its setting...For every person nearing retirement, every latent writer who hopes to leave his island and find the literary mainland, its author–quiet, self-sufficient, tidy Homeric–remains a patron saint." –Allan Gurganus, O Magazine
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 40
One Last Sweet Summer Read August 21, 2010
Elizabeth Benedict (Anywhere, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
All books published posthumously come to us shrink-wrapped in heartache, from a voice we know has already been extinguished. There is more sadness still in a subgroup of this category: books that come from manuscripts abandoned during wartime or hidden for safekeeping and discovered when the fighting is over, when the text is all that's left of the author.
A brief list of such books: The Diary of Anne Frank, Irene Nemirovsky Suite Francaise, Charlotte Salomon's autobiographical notebook-size gouaches with text, 769 individual pages, that she called Life? Or Theater? The last is not a book in the old-fashioned sense -- its pages are exhibited in museums and Salomon arranged them as acts in a play -- but I'm comfortable thinking of it as an early graphic novel. It tells the story of a gifted young artist in Berlin whose Jewish parents sent her to live with relatives in France before the Occupation, certain she would be safe there. It was only when they went to find her in 1947 that they learned she had died at Auschwitz -- and left a carton containing an illustrated account of her life, including her harrowing final years in a world gone mad. "Keep this safe," she had told a friend. "It is my whole life."
The story of J.B. Edwards' posthumous and only novel, The Book of Ebenezer LePage, is less dramatic but heartbreaking in its own distinctive way. "There may have been stranger recent literary events than the book you are about to read," writes John Fowles in the essential introduction to the book, first published in the UK and the US in 1981, "but I rather doubt it."
Edwards' biography is sketchy, deliberately so; over the years he burned all but the few documents that would be necessary after his death. What's important to know is that he was born on Guernsey in 1899, one of the two larger Channel Islands; that he left the island permanently in about 1926 for London, having been disinherited by his father and so losing the family house; that he had a wife and four children in London whom he abandoned when they were young and had virtually nothing to do with for the rest of his life; and that he spent his last five years in a rooming house just outside Weymouth, writing and rewriting this novel whose every line burns with love and longing for Guernsey -- the remote, unsullied island of his youth, not the tourist destination and tax haven it became.
In the mid-1970s, he tried without success to get it published. A story that seemed this old-fashioned didn't have a chance at that time, proving his point precisely: things really were better back in the day.
Weymouth, though it is 70 miles across the Channel from Guernsey, is the coastal town closest to it, and the closest Edwards could get once he lost his father's house and once Guernsey became so expensive that he could not survive there on his modest pension from working as a civil servant. In his last years, Edwards befriended a couple who encouraged him and edited his work, and to whom the book is dedicated. When he died in 1976, they helped get the manuscript to John Fowles, who helped bring it to light.
I say all of this because a book this odd needs an introduction and a context, and because the torment and longing that are evident in Edwards' skeletal biography are some of what give the narrator, Ebenezer LePage, his inimitable voice, and what give the book its breathtaking emotional heft, though Ebenezer's biography is quite different from his creator's. Part of Edwards' brilliance and the book's walloping power are that it is not what it seems to be, a quaint, chatty, meandering, provincial novel written, of all things, in a charming patois. It has those characteristics, but it is ultimately none of those things, and it is also, we learn in the end, a carefully structured book within a book. It is much more "modern" than the trendy editors who turned it down in the 1970s wanted to see at the time.
But one can understand their reluctance. The story doesn't sound like much, especially to city folks and ironists: Lifetime islander, tomato farmer and sometime fisherman Ebenezer LePage's personal history of Guernsey, from 1890 to 1970. Guernsey is famous for four things: its natural beauty; its being home to Victor Hugo during the fifteen years of his exile; its having been the only British Isle to be invaded and occupied by the Germans, from 1940 to 1945; and because its current laws make it a great place for tax free shopping and for hiding more serious money from the tax man, a tawdry turn of events that mightily displeased Ebenezer LePage. As Fowles puts it: "This inability to forget the old, this querulousness over the new, is what makes Ebenezer LePage such a convincing portrayal of a much more universal mentality than the matter of the book might at first suggest."
Writing in exile, in monastic circumstances, alienated from his grown children, and successful at destroying the evidence of his actual history, Edwards creates a narrator with none of that baggage, but nevertheless a man who knows all there is to know about the art of losing. Ebenezer never married, never abandoned a family, was never disinherited, and never had to remember Guersney from a rooming house across the Channel. For the author, Ebenezer is a fantastic effort of wishful thinking and a voice through which to write this complicated love letter to the past.
Ebenezer is an inveterate kvetcher, but he also loves what he loves to pieces. His voice has music in it, and wonder, joy, wisdom, irony, rage, and deep sadness about time passing and life and love slipping from our hands the way they always do.
I have never read a book that made me cry as this one does -- not at the conclusion or when a special character dies, but for pages on end, here and there and there and there. I can't even read the opening lines with tearing up, but I have no idea if it's because I know what will follow (Ebenezer's friend Jim will die, the Germans will come, the tourists will descend, it will no longer be the perfect place it once was), or because there is something truly tearful in them (Sarnia, by the way, is Guernsey in Latin): "Guernsey, Guernesey, Garnsai, Sarnia: so they say. Well, I don't know, I'm sure. The older I get and the more I learn, the more I know I don't know nothing, me. I am the oldest on the island, I think. Liza Queripel from Pleinmont say she is older; but I reckon she is putting it on. When she was a young woman, she used to have a birthday once every two or three years; but for years now she have been having two or three a year."
I would like nothing better than to quote more delicious passages from the book, but there are so many I have underlined and they are so interconnected, I don't know where to start and do any of them justice. And I'm certain I would end up in tears. Instead, a few more facts: In its wonderful new program to give new life to old books, The New York Review of Books just reprinted Ebenezer LePage, along with the Fowles essay. And none other than Harold Bloom chose it for inclusion in his Western Canon. So read it if you're a canonista, or just read it because it's wonderful.
Cross-posted from Huffington Post; first appeared in Tin House.
A unique local perspective June 15, 2010
Peter Lihou (Guernsey)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
G B Edwards spent much of his life away from the island of Guernsey which speaks volumes for his ability to capture so accurately the period and parlance of the local community.
His writing style and perspective draw the reader into what was then a remote world; not quite English, but not quite French. As a local author myself, I would love to have Edwards' character depiction and wry humour. To those of you who may be far afield, I can tell you the book is revered locally as a classic and our community can be quite critical of those who attempt to portray life on our islands and do so badly!
Ebenezer is, of course, a fine literary work ranking amongst the best published by authors of the 20th century, it is also an important historical work as although fictional, the events affecting this island are accurately portrayed. Especially the period of German Occupation during World War 2.
Having grown up here (I'm writing this in St Peter Port), I very much enjoyed the references to places long since dropped from everyday use and have to admit to the embarrassment of not even knowing one or two of the places despite my family roots going back as far as parish records began here!
Recently, of course, another story about our island has been very much in the headlines. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Random House Reader's Circle) Inevitably comparisons will be drawn but there should be none, the books are quite different and appeal to different senses. I would encourage you to read both for different reasons and with different expectations. I confess to enjoying the occasional chilled and dry Chardonnay on a summer's day with my lunch but more usually my taste would be full bodied red wine, especially with dinner.
I wholeheartedly recommend Ebenezer Le Page to you, with dinner rather than lunch!
Don not miss this beautiful novel May 12, 2010
Osaggie (New York, NY)
This is a gorgeous novel, not to be missed. My 1981 Knopf edition has a superb introduction by John Fowles, and all editions include a glossary of Guernsey's French patrois. One of my all time favorites, and I have given it to many friends who also consider it a gem.
 A well written endurance test March 2, 2010
Night Bird (Sherwood Forest)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I found this about as riveting as 'Lark Rise to Candleford', which for me was an endurance test. It lacks any kind of pace as a story but as a historical document it is very well written.
It all depends upon you. If you are looking for a pedestrian account of ordinary life on a small island in the English Channel, this is the book for you. It's authentic and contains the minutiae of everyday life along with the inevitable small triumphs and defeats one might expect of the period. Ebenezer himself is either quaint or infuriating depending upon your perspective. We are often kinder to 'grumpy old men' in books than we would be in real life.
There are books that contain the atmosphere and authenticity of this book but in the context of a much more engaging storyline.
A Wonderful Book; A Delightful Classic; August 21, 2009
zorba (Bala Cynwyd, Pa USA)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This wonderful book moved and delighted me. It is simple in that it is almost a diary of a long life lived on the fascinating island of Guernsey. But it is enormously profound in the depth and breadth of its wit and wisdom. I can't think of much to add to the chorus of acclaim that reviewers have given it herr on Amazon.com All I can do is add emphasis to the consensus that this is a book the serious reader will love and never forget.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 40
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