The Awakening of Miss Prim
Book Recommendation
In addition to the twice-monthly reflections on literature, I’ll be sharing book recommendations. These will be non-classic books which I have enjoyed or been challenged by in the past year.
Up first is Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera’s 2015 novel, The Awakening of Miss Prim.
Whatever impression the book’s title gives, it’s probably inaccurate. This is not a harlequin romance. The awakening is of an intellectual, spiritual, and communal nature. There’s still a love story, but as I vented in my essay about Jane Austen adaptations, all good love stories require real, earnest character development, not just yearning.
Instead, this book lets us ruminate on the value of community, of education, and of traditions.
The titular character, Miss Prudencia Prim (one thing I love is the Dickensian names all of the characters have), answers an advertisement for a private librarian in a small town.
Wanted: a feminine spirit quite undaunted by the world to work as a librarian for a gentleman and his books. Able to live with dogs and children. Preferably without work experience. Graduates and postgraduates need not apply.
She soon finds that the town is brim-full of talented, well-educated eccentrics, especially her employer, whom she calls “The Man in the Wing Chair.”
The town, a refuge from the modern world, operates on G.K. Chesterton’s distributism principle that a small community could organize its economy in a more accommodating and humane way than the modern world usually sees. Businesses and workers organize their time around family life and private endeavors, rather than maximizing productivity, and because they are mutually supporting each other, it works.
It’s essentially “building an ark,” using the Benedict Option tactic of improving the small part of the world you can actually help. It’s a life worth pursuing, even though I think the reality would have a little less tea and a lot more working class hardships.
The book challenges us to rethink and reimagine, among other things:
the concept and the length of a work week
the institution of marriage
education’s purpose and design
small-town newspapers and civic societies
which institutions provide the truest freedom
are we meant to be productive or contemplative, and can the two be reconciled?
This book is cozy enough for tired evenings but provocative enough to start some great conversations.
Two characters even have a debate about the value of Little Women in the literary canon, and that is a debate well worth having.
We know lots of parts of poems and stories by heart - it’s the first thing we do with all books. He says it’s how you learn to love books’ it’s got a lot to do with memory.
He says when men fall in love with women they learn their faces by heart so they can remember them later. They notice the color of their eyes, the color of their hair; whether they like music, prefer chocolate or biscuits, what their brothers and sisters are called, whether they write a diary, or have a cat….
It’s the same with books. In lessons we learn bits by heart and recite them. Then we read the books and discuss them and then we read them again.