Book Review: I Capture the Castle By Dodie Smith
Cassandra Mortmain is a 17 year old girl living in a rundown castle in Suffolk, England during the 1930's. Her father is an eccentric ex-writer prone to extreme isolation and doesn't mind one bit that he isn't providing for his family, letting them fall further and further into poverty. Cassandra has two other siblings and a bohemian model stepmother, Topaz. Rose is 21 and Thomas must be around 14 or 15, and along with an orphaned housekeepers son, Stephen who's 19, they all live together in the castle. At the beginning of the novel Rose loath's her father for letting the family become destitute. Topaz is trying to help her husbands' genius anyway she can, Stephen copies romantic poems for Cassandra which she finds endearing but awkward, and Thomas is a school boy more interested in his own affairs than that of his sisters. Things begin to happen once The Cottons, two American brothers Simon and Neil, inherit a near by estate and realize they are landlords to the Mortmains.
The novel follows the family for six months, Cassandra narrating their lives and exploits in three journal notebooks.
This is one of my favorite bildungsroman (coming-of-age) novels. It's the second 1/2 time I've read it, this time as a fully fledged adult, and i'm just as enchanted with the novel as I was back in high school/college. I Capture the Castle's nostalgic tone shines a wistful light on all of England for me. The first person POV draws you in and begins setting the scene, the descriptions of the castle and surrounding March countryside so vivid that you could reach in through the pages and be there yourself standing next to the kitchen fire. I'm in love with the imagery that Dodie Smith paints like a master artist over a canvass of wet oil paint. Metaphors spring out at you, gripping and tangible. I just loved every minute of re-reading this book.
I think it resonates with me so much more this time, because I too am incredibly homesick. Dodie Smith wrote I Capture the Castle while living in America for a few years. The attention detail of England its strikingly nostalgic, romantic, and melancholy, all of which she weaves into the mood and tone of the book. The longing I feel from I Capture the Castle is the exact same longing that I too feel for my home North Carolina (but it's buried between the context). I Capture the Castle has the feel of an updated (1930's) take on a Jane Austen novel, except that our heroine doesn't end up marrying in the end.
I Capture the Castle is very nostalgic and sentimental for me. It reminds me so heavily of my grandmother that there is a sad bang in my chest, when I was re-reading over the past few days. To understand how I feel about this book I need to also give you a slight history on why it's so important to me. My Grandmother was the one who read a review about I Capture the Castle in her local newspaper (I'm guessing it was like a recommended book of the month type of book club thing), circled it, brought me over to the newspaper, when I came to visit saying she thought that this would be a book I would be interested in. When I'd read the blurb and told her I wanted to read it she then drove me to the bookstore. She had to put in an order for the novel because the local bookstore was small and didn't have it in stock. But she bought it for me and gave it to me to read when it arrived and told me she was going to read it too. She was wonderful like that. She always encouraged me to read.
This was back when I was in high school, I can't remember if I was a junior or senior (I think maybe a senior?) and then I got grounded by my parents for not going to church with them and having a big fight about it (this was before they were bribing me, so maybe it was the summer between junior and senior year?). My dad took away I Capture the Castle and he hid it. At this point they couldn't take anything else away from me, just my books. (I was about halfway through, and was so pissed that I couldn't finish it immediately). We didn't have cable in the house anymore, and I didn't play video games, and I needed my car to drive my brother and I to school; and the internet wasn't what it was like now, so yeah, I read a lot. Time passed with my punishment, I guess I'd gone to church the next Sunday just so I could have my book back, but when I asked for it my dad said he'd forgotten where he'd hid it... frustrated I went looking for it but it wasn't in any of the usual hiding places, and my heathen and anti-evangelical ways had really pissed them off during that fight and he'd probably been so angry that he'd flung the book somewhere. I had lost hope of ever seeing the book again, and had resigned it to the black hole that was my parents house (they'd lost my brothers N64 for 6 weeks until I found it under a pile of clothes in my parents bathroom).
Skip to my first year of college and my grandmother had just passed away from cancer. I was devastated. I had been incredibly close to my grandmother. After the funeral I was desperate to find and be around anything and everything that reminded me of her. That's when I remembered I Capture the Castle. When I'd come back home for the weekend I went into a frantic search of the house looking for it. My thoughts had been that my dad had stuffed the book in the hordes of clothing my parents had piled in their bedroom. I knew it had to be in there. When that didn't yield anything, I searched through drawers, the closet, under the bed, and became so frustrated that I was literally started crying. I had begun to associate the book with finding some lost part of my grandmother. I literally couldn't find the book anywhere. However, my parents had two tall dresser-drawers in their bedroom. Both of them were tremendously tall. I hadn't searched the tops of those yet. I went for the step stool and climbed up high enough to see over the top, and lo and behold my dusty copy of I Capture the Castle book lay perched on top. I screamed "I found it!" and ran around the house, the book thrust in the air like a trophy. When I'd finally calmed down enough I sat in the living room, picked up right where I'd left off, and refused to move again until I'd finished the book.
I realize that my little anecdotal story doesn't have anything to do with I Capture the Castle as a literary work, but it makes me treasure the novel so much more. I had decided to re-read because of my homesickness, and I'm so glad I did. I brought back all of the fond memories of my grandmother in a time that I needed them. Just when I needed them back in the fall of 2006 when she'd passed away.
I hope that you find I Capture the Castle as delightful as I have, and that you find a book that clings to your soul helping you to come back from whatever sad emotions that you may be feeling. I do recommend this book. Just just because of me, but because of the beautiful prose of Dodie Smith and the way she invokes and enchants emotions.
The novel follows the family for six months, Cassandra narrating their lives and exploits in three journal notebooks.
This is one of my favorite bildungsroman (coming-of-age) novels. It's the second 1/2 time I've read it, this time as a fully fledged adult, and i'm just as enchanted with the novel as I was back in high school/college. I Capture the Castle's nostalgic tone shines a wistful light on all of England for me. The first person POV draws you in and begins setting the scene, the descriptions of the castle and surrounding March countryside so vivid that you could reach in through the pages and be there yourself standing next to the kitchen fire. I'm in love with the imagery that Dodie Smith paints like a master artist over a canvass of wet oil paint. Metaphors spring out at you, gripping and tangible. I just loved every minute of re-reading this book.
I think it resonates with me so much more this time, because I too am incredibly homesick. Dodie Smith wrote I Capture the Castle while living in America for a few years. The attention detail of England its strikingly nostalgic, romantic, and melancholy, all of which she weaves into the mood and tone of the book. The longing I feel from I Capture the Castle is the exact same longing that I too feel for my home North Carolina (but it's buried between the context). I Capture the Castle has the feel of an updated (1930's) take on a Jane Austen novel, except that our heroine doesn't end up marrying in the end.
I Capture the Castle is very nostalgic and sentimental for me. It reminds me so heavily of my grandmother that there is a sad bang in my chest, when I was re-reading over the past few days. To understand how I feel about this book I need to also give you a slight history on why it's so important to me. My Grandmother was the one who read a review about I Capture the Castle in her local newspaper (I'm guessing it was like a recommended book of the month type of book club thing), circled it, brought me over to the newspaper, when I came to visit saying she thought that this would be a book I would be interested in. When I'd read the blurb and told her I wanted to read it she then drove me to the bookstore. She had to put in an order for the novel because the local bookstore was small and didn't have it in stock. But she bought it for me and gave it to me to read when it arrived and told me she was going to read it too. She was wonderful like that. She always encouraged me to read.
This was back when I was in high school, I can't remember if I was a junior or senior (I think maybe a senior?) and then I got grounded by my parents for not going to church with them and having a big fight about it (this was before they were bribing me, so maybe it was the summer between junior and senior year?). My dad took away I Capture the Castle and he hid it. At this point they couldn't take anything else away from me, just my books. (I was about halfway through, and was so pissed that I couldn't finish it immediately). We didn't have cable in the house anymore, and I didn't play video games, and I needed my car to drive my brother and I to school; and the internet wasn't what it was like now, so yeah, I read a lot. Time passed with my punishment, I guess I'd gone to church the next Sunday just so I could have my book back, but when I asked for it my dad said he'd forgotten where he'd hid it... frustrated I went looking for it but it wasn't in any of the usual hiding places, and my heathen and anti-evangelical ways had really pissed them off during that fight and he'd probably been so angry that he'd flung the book somewhere. I had lost hope of ever seeing the book again, and had resigned it to the black hole that was my parents house (they'd lost my brothers N64 for 6 weeks until I found it under a pile of clothes in my parents bathroom).
Skip to my first year of college and my grandmother had just passed away from cancer. I was devastated. I had been incredibly close to my grandmother. After the funeral I was desperate to find and be around anything and everything that reminded me of her. That's when I remembered I Capture the Castle. When I'd come back home for the weekend I went into a frantic search of the house looking for it. My thoughts had been that my dad had stuffed the book in the hordes of clothing my parents had piled in their bedroom. I knew it had to be in there. When that didn't yield anything, I searched through drawers, the closet, under the bed, and became so frustrated that I was literally started crying. I had begun to associate the book with finding some lost part of my grandmother. I literally couldn't find the book anywhere. However, my parents had two tall dresser-drawers in their bedroom. Both of them were tremendously tall. I hadn't searched the tops of those yet. I went for the step stool and climbed up high enough to see over the top, and lo and behold my dusty copy of I Capture the Castle book lay perched on top. I screamed "I found it!" and ran around the house, the book thrust in the air like a trophy. When I'd finally calmed down enough I sat in the living room, picked up right where I'd left off, and refused to move again until I'd finished the book.
I realize that my little anecdotal story doesn't have anything to do with I Capture the Castle as a literary work, but it makes me treasure the novel so much more. I had decided to re-read because of my homesickness, and I'm so glad I did. I brought back all of the fond memories of my grandmother in a time that I needed them. Just when I needed them back in the fall of 2006 when she'd passed away.
I hope that you find I Capture the Castle as delightful as I have, and that you find a book that clings to your soul helping you to come back from whatever sad emotions that you may be feeling. I do recommend this book. Just just because of me, but because of the beautiful prose of Dodie Smith and the way she invokes and enchants emotions.
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