In the Mountains, Elizabeth Von Arnim

Elizabeth Von Arnim FTW!
I'm not always this over-enthusiastic. But I took a week off from most internet-related stuff (I still can't get rid of my facebook games addiction, alas!) and read, read, read...

Well, I didn't read that much. First it was my birthday, and then my mother's, and then we had a celebration at my Abuelita's house (Granny, for the Spanish-challenged), and then we went to a fair that sells plants and flowers, so in those busy days I didn't read a thing. But what it matters is that even if I haven't been glued to a book, at least most of the time I've been blissfully lost in five, six different stories, all of them lovely. And today I finished the third.

I don't think the narrator of Elizabeth von Arnim's In the Mountains ever gave her name away. It's written as the diary of an English woman, in her late twenties, early thirties, who's feeling awfully wretched after the war (the WWI) and the lost of some very important people in her life, though we only hear of them in passing, and never in much detail since the memories hurt the narrator so much.

She goes to her summer house in Switzerland, up in the mountains (hence the title), hoping to be healed by the good weather and the scenery. She's alone there, except for the Antoines, a couple that guards the house, but they don't seem to be able to give her much comfort or company:

[Mrs. Antoine] hadn't expected, I suppose, the mistress of the house, when she did at last get back to it, to behave like some strange alien slug, crawled up the mountain only to lie motionless in the sun for the best part of a fortnight. I head her, after the first two days of this conduct, explaining it to Antoine, who however needed no explanation because of his god-like habit of never being surprised, and her explanation was that c'était la guerre,—convenient explanation that has been used to excuse many more unnatural and horrible things during the last five years than somebody's behaving as if she were a slug.

I don't know what I expected from this book, but I certainly wasn't expecting it to be this soothing and funny. I thought it was about grief, nature, healing and goat milk or something—in a very boring way. But it was surprisingly lighthearted. The narrator starts getting better and the entries in her diary get longer each day, as she recovers strength. And the better she feels, the funnier she gets, which only shows how hard was the war on her and how much she lost in it. And the story only gets better when two English widows in severe, old-fashioned clothes, appear at her door bringing with them equal parts of secrets and comedy material.

We live here in an atmosphere of combats de générosité. It is tremendous. Mrs. Barnes and I are always doing things we don't want to do because we suppose it is what is going to make the other one happy. The tyranny of unselfishness! I can hardly breathe.

You can get the ebook for free at girlebooks. And here it's Claire's from The Captive Readers review.

And that's it. Tomorrow, when I feel less buoyant, I'll tackle Nick Hornby's More Baths, Less Talking. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have an abandoned Google Reader to catch up with.