Until the last story, which is the title story and the last that Storm wrote, I wasn’t enraptured by this book. Each story had its satisfying bits, but mostly they were too self-consciously stories, too concerned with doomed love, too nostalgic.
But I liked this, from “In the Great Hall,” the last bit especially:
[she] often stood near the glass door in the winter and breathed on the frozen panes; then she would peer through, down into the snow-filled garden, and dream of the lovely summer, the gleaming leaves and warm sunlight, the robin that built there, the ripe apricots that once rolled across the ground; then she would dream of summer days generally and, finally, she dreamed of nothing except the one day of all days, and her mind was all summer. (p 20)
And this, from “Aquis Submersus,” the solid everyday detail of it:
And yet, how friendly I found the rooms of that old house! In winter I liked the small chamber to the right of the vestibule, and in summer the large room on the left, on whose white-washed wall, in mahogany frames, they had hung some pictures cut from the Reformation almanac. From the western window of that room, all one could see was a single-far off windmill; but there was also the whole broad sky, which every evening absolutely filled the entire room with radiance! The pastor’s beloved family, the easy chair with its red plush cushions, the ample old sofa, and resting on the table in the light of the sunset, the teakettle, humming with reassurance—everything was bright, friendly, alive in the present moment. (p 121)
And then came the last story, which I liked too much to pick out one thing: the wind and the weather, the images of the sea and the light over the mudflats, the determination and pettiness of the various characters, the coziness of the story (in the story) being told in a warm room on a cold night.
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