I Capture The Castle

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A delicious, compulsively readable novel about young love and its vicissitudes. What fun!” —Erica Jong The great pleasure of I Capture the Castle is Cassandra’s voice, which remains candid and blunt even when she’s in the deepest throes of heartbreak. At one point her misery is so intense that “I wanted to fling myself down in the mud and beat my way into the ground,” but, she remarks, “I had just enough sense to know what I should look like after trying.” At her most miserable, “I found myself going round leaning against walls — I can’t think why misery makes me lean against walls, but it does.” Cassandra has a wry detachment from her own emotions that keeps them funny but also keeps the feeling running beneath the surface of the book like a stream: You laugh at her heartbreak, but you feel it deeply too. cassandra's father. a supposed genius but in reality a sexist, abusive, loathsome, distant fellow. he appears sporadically to ignore his children, leave his wife lonely, make everyone question his sanity and demand his supper from the ladies of the house. the frustrating part of this character is that his terrible behavior is overlooked and often glorified when he should be taken to task. i spent a good part of this book longing for someone to throw him into the moat.

I thought there were just a few missteps in the story: the chain of unrequited love interests was pushing the boundaries of believability (woman wants boy, who loves girl, who loves another guy, who loves another girl, who loves…). I guessed one big reveal at the end fairly early in the story. Cassandra spends a chapter or two examining her views on religion and talking to the local vicar, and then never mentions it again, which made me wonder why it was included in the first place. Romola Garai (Cassandra Mortmain) and Henry Thomas (Simon Cotton) in I Capture the Castle. Photograph: Allstar/BBCVery conversational and meandering. The main character grated quite a bit on me, with the continuous “I want something badly, but it never is going to happen” and “Oh, it happened, but I didn’t end up taking the opportunity because I like drama/I just don’t know” vibe. What can I say about this book, other than it’s delightful and wonderful and perfect, and needs to be read if it not a thing you have already read (and, frankly, if it is a thing you have already read, needs to be read again, and read often).

Only 122 words and you have a character there, speaking in your ear: honest, funny, contradictory, alive. There’s that famous first line of course, but more than that, the way she conveys the character and her milieu without it feeling stagey. We learn that what we’re reading is the journal of 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, an aspiring novelist. Letters and diaries as a device in fiction tend to make me itchy (and novels about novelists normally bring me out in a rash): it’s just so difficult to get right. Often you get a diary or a letter that doesn’t read like one, or if by some chance it does, flattens out the storytelling. But what Smith does is make that voice the creator of the world. Things come into being through their relationship to her and we never doubt any of it for a moment. The final lines of the book, as Cassandra fills the last space, are a throb of some­thing so nebulous as to be ghostlike

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The characters are rather exuberant in how they are portrayed by Dodie Smith, Topaz for instance is tall and pale as a slightly dead goddess.

In 1963 Walt Disney Productions announced plans to film the novel with Hayley Mills in the role of Cassandra. [3] Disney ended up dropping the project, while still retaining film rights to the book, when Smith and the selected screenwriter Sally Benson did not get along. [4] Mills grew too old for the part before the project could be revived, [4] but Disney denied film rights to any other studio until intense legal leveraging in the late 1990s after Smith's death, which eventually resulted in the 2003 BBC Film production. [4] [5] Then, just a short paragraph later, once she has given herself a stern talking to: “A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad? There was mist on Midsummer Eve, mist when we drove into the dawn.

NO THIS BOOK IS NOT LIKE "POND SCUM" AND USING THAT DESCRIPTION FOR IT SAYS MORE ABOUT YOU THAN IT DOES ABOUT THE BOOK. I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic—two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself was built in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to a fourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The whole of our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers in it. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at their full height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by. But I won’t attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now. Cassandra and Rose think of themselves as two sisters from a 19th-century marriage plot book, “two Brontë-Jane Austen girls,” Cassandra writes, “poor but spirited, two girls of Godsend castle.” So as the book opens in March, and they learn that their new landlords are two rich and handsome young American brothers, they know exactly what that means for the kind of story they’re living in: It’s the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, and Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy have just come to town. As long as Rose, the family beauty, can arrange to fall in love with the richer one, their happy ending is assured. Cassandra skillfully describes her father’s distance and failure to do anything to provide for the family, her stepmother’s charm and eccentricity, and her older sister Rose’s despair at their isolation and poverty. But what broke my heart was her matter-of-fact descriptions of how their poverty affects their lives every day: the too-small, worn-out clothing the girls have to wear; her gratitude for having eggs along with bread and margarine for their evening meal; the way the girls trade off sleeping in the one comfortable bed in their room (which hasn’t been sold only because it’s in such bad shape). Rose, the more beautiful sister, is grimly determined to escape from poverty, even if she has to marry a man she doesn't love. When two young American brothers move into town (the older son, Simon, is the family’s new and wealthy landlord), the Mortmains’ lives are all turned topsy-turvy, with love, romance and secrets. What a lovely book is I Capture the Castle. It's as fresh as if it were written this morning, and as classic as Jane Austen. I'm very happy to have met it.” —Donald E. Westlake