Sherriff handles the passage of time with a great deal of perception and wisdom. The passing of the days while on the holiday, the speeding up of time as the two weeks progress, and also the changes in people and places as time advances. Seaview isn’t the same as it used to be, the children are growing, and Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, while aging themselves, feel all of this with the same acute awareness I’ve been forced to admit myself just recently. Yet, I’m hopeful of the future as is Mary Stevens. Things don’t have to come to a bitter end. Things change yet new adventures are within our grasp if we allow ourselves the opportunities. Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. It couldn’t be a play. It wasn’t the sort of story for the theatre, and in any case plays were done with. I began to feel the itch to take one of those families at random and build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea.

Proprio non ricordo come questo libro sia finito nella mia wishlist e da lì prima o poi inevitabilmente approdato alla lettura: sconosciuto il titolo, altrettanto ignoto l’autore che mai avevo sentito nominare, poco allettante la sinossi, nessun consiglio di amici, probabilmente si è trattato di una recensione galeotta che prometteva troppo. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali is my top comfort read. It never fails to make me laugh because this is not a humble memoir: “I am essentially a visionary, a sort of sounding board for total truth.” Dalí wishes to astound us with his genius, to celebrate his madness, to give full-blown vent to his erotic hallucinations, his fear and fascination with life, death, paranoia and religion. All the same, his silver tongue is firmly in his vain cheek.Sherriff wrote his first play to help Kingston Rowing Club raise money to buy a new boat. [13] His seventh play, Journey's End, was written in 1928 and published in 1929 and was based on his experiences in the war. [3] It was given a single Sunday performance, on 9 December 1928, by the Incorporated Stage Society at the Apollo Theatre, directed by James Whale and with the 21-year-old Laurence Olivier in the lead role. [14] In the audience was Maurice Browne who produced it at the Savoy Theatre where it was performed for two years from 1929. [15] The play was hugely successful and there was wide press coverage which reveals how audience responses provoked by this play shaped understanding of the First World War in the interwar years. [16] Novelist [ edit ]

At the end of the story, I was left wondering if we were seeing this family tradition for the last time, with lost luster fighting built loyalties fighting the desire to expand. And then I realized that it didn’t matter - it might be the last fortnight at Seaview for the Stevens, and it might not - for eventually, it will end. We can never really know what moment will be our last. Sherriff reminds us to make the best of our time. That powdery old metaphor is deliberate because The Fortnight in September is set at the seaside. It's about a lower-middle-class family, the Stevens, who live on the outskirts of London, making their annual two-week holiday pilgrimage to the coastal resort town of Bognor Regis. The parents, who, in the more formal custom of the times, are known as Mr. and Mrs. Stevens — first stayed there on their honeymoon at a guest house called "Seaview."

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Arriving in Bognor they head to Seaview, the guesthouse where they stay every year. It’s a bit shabbier than it once was—the landlord has died and his wife is struggling as the number of guests dwindles every year. But the family finds bliss in booking a slightly bigger cabana, with a balcony, and in their rediscovery of the familiar places they visit every year. The foreword to this book is an excerpt from R.C. Sherriff's autobiography, wherein he discusses how he wrote The Fortnight in September. He had had a marvelous success as a playwright with Journey's End: Play, but then he had an idea which he could only turn into a novel: the simple story of a family on their annual seaside holiday. Sherriff groped for the right style, finding that "flowery stuff and highfalutin words" weren't right and seeking a more down-to-earth style which would match his characters. He found that he had to learn to know the Stevens family before he could write about them without looking down or up to them, instead to "walk with them easily, side by side."

Goodbye, Mr. Chips – which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay along with his co-writers Claudine West, Eric Maschwitz The guest house was a little shabby, but it was as familiar as home. The Stevens had stayed with the Huggetts every year when the came to Bognor, but this year things would be a little different. Mr Huggett had died and Mrs Huggett was having to manage things on her own. So, even though they noticed that things were a little shabbier than usual, the family would not dream of saying a word. De Stevensen halen hun voldoening uit routine, niét uit avontuur. Een onverwachte ontmoeting is geen verademing, eerder een verzoeking. Een ongeplande uitnodiging veroorzaakt geen voorpret, maar onderhuidse stress. De bagage bestaat voornamelijk uit mantels der liefde, waarmee kleine akkefietjes discreet worden bedekt. Comunque sia andata, accade talvolta che in questi casi si venga sorpresi da un’imprevista rivelazione…e invece no; alla fine “Due settimane in settembre” rimane all’altezza delle mie modeste aspettative, tanto che da tempo non incappavo in un romanzo così esangue e scritto con uno stile altrettanto incolore.

R.C. Sherriff

This novel is elegant. The sentences are beautiful in their precision, and often filled with wisdom. The atmosphere goes from a fresh filling of lungs, to a dusty, peeling interior in which a middle-class family has lived good days. The action is to forge onward and create these good days again, despite erosion, or a drifting away. It is a celebration of life, this novel, in all of its ordinariness. And a family so very well drawn, whose the story catches so much that is important in life: home, family, friendship, love, the passing of the years, disappointment, acceptance … with wonderful subtlety and honesty. Harmonie staat voorop en waar een moderne auteur die al snel vakkundig om zeep zou helpen om voor de nodige dramatische spanning te zorgen, draagt Sherriff er nauwgezet zorg voor dat elke rimpel geruisloos wordt gladgestreken. The Fortnight in September was a very brave book to write because it was not obviously ‘about’ anything except the ‘drama of the undramatic’. And yet the greatness of the novel is that it is about each one of us: all of human life is here in the seemingly simple description of the family’s annual holiday in Bognor. Thus, for reasons we do not have to explain to regular Persephone readers, this is a book which fits fairly and squarely on the Persephone list.