The Pursuit of Love (Radlett and Montdore #1) -

Nancy Mitford

Penguin

2015

204 páginas

6h 48m

ISBN-13: 9780241974681

Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest, sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written.

'Obsessed with sex!' said Jassy, 'there's nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I'm a pygmalionist.'

In the end we got more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding.
'Ducks can only copulate,' said Linda, after studying this for a while, 'in running water. Good luck to them.'

Oh, the tedium of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the lookout for the perfect lover.

But finding Mr Right is much harder than any of the sisters had thought. Linda must suffer marriage first to a stuffy Tory MP and then to a handsome and humourless communist, before finding real love in war-torn Paris. . .

'Utter, utter bliss' Daily Mail

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

This is not my review, but part of Zoë Heller's briliant introduction, which perfectly sum up the spirit of the novel:

Mitford is not embarressed by earnestness and effort: she is embarressed by the advertisement of these things, certainly, but the hard work that it takes to keep up a "good shop-front" is something she admires very much. Linda's lover, Fabrice, who speaks so eloquently in defense of "les gens du monde", does in fact have principles for which he is prepared to risk his life: he simply wouldn't dream of boring a lady with those principles at luncheon. Linda herself has plenty of private sorrows: it would just never occur to her to whine about them publicly.
It is the elegance of this discretion - the courage for it - that ultimately redeems Mitford's heroine. More than her beauty or bouquet-like charm, what we are asked to admire in Linda is the bravery with which she pursues her rackety course. [...] And [...] if she falls in love with asses and often makes an ass of herself in the process - she has the good sense and the guts to never apologize, never explain.
Whether it is better to hold out, like Linda, enduring loneliness and infamy in return for the occasional feast of transcendent pleasure, or to settle like Fanny for a steady but uninspiring diet of marital contentment, is one of the great questions of the novel. Fanny envies the glamour of Linda's adventures, but she has too much sense not to be appalled by the radical uncertainty of a life lived according to sensibility. The possibility that her friend will end up with "nothing to show" for her troubles frightens her. And when she asserts, at the end of the novel, that Linda has found true love with Fabrice, this seems to be her way of reassuring herself that Linda's existence has, after all, had meaning, that her pursuit of love has not been in vain. Fanny's mother, the Bolter (who knows quite a lot about the ways of men like Fabrice) is doubtful. But if her sceptical words - the final words of the novel - seem to point to an utterly comfortless conclusion, Linda herself has shown us one further possibility: that a life lived with passion and brio may have beauty and value, even if one ends up with "nothing to show for it" and that the search for true love is a noble endeavour, whether or not it concludes in domestic bliss.