Reviews

The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy

rachel_the_managing_editor's review

funny medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

A funny little adventure book (where the stakes are matters of the heart) that spans England to Italy as nineteen-year-old Susan goes in search of the girl she kissed once in high school. Shenanigans ensue, feelings are hurt, and lessons (one imagines) are only learned years later, off the page and in retrospect. 

mrh29992's review against another edition

funny reflective

4.5

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Content Warnings

Minor: Racial slurs and Antisemitism

dnauvrg's review

5.0

Brilliant, quite poignant. For all the whimsy and mischief of Susan and Neale's travels, Susan's own quieter personal journey/growth is the true story here and Brophy renders it with great tenderness and understanding. Many times I've read a book and been disappointed and frustrated with the lack of certainty at the end, but I feel perfectly content and even sort of thrilled with the many ambiguities The King of a Rainy Country leaves us with.

Cheers to Coelacanth Press for bringing this book back! I am already planning to reread it.

shimmer's review

5.0

This is a novel I spent years intending to read, and I'm so glad I finally did. There's a coolness to it — not "hip" cool but "reserved" cool — that reminds me of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, but for a novel driven so much by memory (quite literally, as it's a memory of an old schoolmate that sets the characters off on their travels), I was surprised that the memories weren't difficult ones or traumatic ones to be reconciled with — that's such a familiar type of story and Brophy avoids it. What strikes me in The King of A Rainy Country is that the characters don't seem traumatized or damaged so much as bored with the options before them and actively trying to make possible a different kind of life. AndA bohemian life of a "life as art." I don't mean that in a dismissive or cheap way, because Brophy's narrator Susan is so precise, so clear in her vision and so attentive to the world (the descriptions of arriving in and exploring Venice alone are some of the best I've ever read) that there really is a sense of turning the world into art and beauty. The language and style of the novel elevate the characters' desires which could have been mere youthful pretension otherwise. It's very, very funny at times, but also wise and sad, and without spoiling anything the way things turn at one point on two characters who thought they were on the same quest realizing they aren't, and having to decide what to do next, is one of the truest moments I've read in fiction.

em_reads_books's review

4.0

"I told some imprecisely imagined interlocutor that each year I hoped to have outgrown being moved by the autumn and each year I hadn't."

This was an interesting one in my reread pile; I remember reading it at least twice in high school or college, I suppose around the narrator's age, but I barely recalled what happened in it. Mostly just a romantic sense of the characters drifting around Europe having Meaningful Conversations in evocative weather, right? It's from the 1950s and... has it aged well? Don't ask me.

I'm not sure I'd love it now as a first-time read, as someone looking for a solid story or deep characters...but as a re-read, expecting to recapture that familiar mood of shabby bohemian aimlessness with a good queer slant, I got exactly what I wanted. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, very much full of the feeling of being young and broke and half in love with unsuitable people.

blankgarden's review

5.0

My review: https://theblankgarden.com/2019/08/20/review-the-king-of-a-rainy-country-brigid-brophy/