Book of a lifetime: The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
From The Independent archive: Katharine McMahon revisits a Russian doll of a novel, where the history of Moscow and England is effortlessly woven with individual lives and nobody is as they seem
When I was quite a new writer, my editor gave me a copy of The Beginning of Spring. I sat in the Underground aglow with pleasure; the book felt like a talisman, writing to which I should aspire.
As a child, I studied the covers of my favourite books, critical if they didn’t live up to the contents. The cover of The Beginning of Spring is stunning and mysterious – a serene portrait of mother and tightly swaddled infant, and a background of flowers, the lattice of a window and possibly something else, indefinable. The colours are deep golds, reds and yellows.
The detail is from an English picture by Frederick Cayley Robinson, and a photograph of St Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow. Try as I might, I cannot make out the cathedral. And this enigmatic cover sums up the entire book, which is so spare yet so dense that though you re-read and re-read, you cannot comprehend everything that’s there.
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