The Beginning of Spring

By Penelope Fitzgerald

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted tale of a troubled Moscow printworks .

Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank’s wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation.

How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican chaplain’s wife? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his chief book-keeper? How do people live together, and what happens when, sometimes, they don’t?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Mar 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780007370092

Penelope Fitzgerald

PENELOPE FITZGERALD wrote many books small in size but enormous in popular and critical acclaim over the past two decades. Over 300,000 copies of her novels are in print, and profiles of her life appeared in both The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In 1979, her novel Offshore won Britain's Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60's, her career was praised as "the best argument ... for a publishing debut made late in life" (New York Times Book Review). She told the New York Times Magazine, "In all that time, I could have written books and I didn’t. I think you can write at any time of your life." Dinitia Smith, in her New York Times Obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, "I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?"

Reviews for The Beginning of Spring

[k6gst · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Frank Reid, a Russian-born Englishman running a printing business in 1913 Moscow, is abandoned by his English wife Nellie and left with his three children to figure out how to make his way forward in uncertain times. Her picture of pre-Revolution Russia is wonderful.Really good—sad, light, funny, evocative, and mysterious.

[steve38 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

What an odd little book. Why was it Booker short listed? Set in pre Great War, pre revolutionary tsarist Russia but featuring an expatriate English family. The wife leaves unexplainedly. The husband deals with in in an emotionless, matter of fact way. He meets stock Russian characters along the way, a Tolstoyan dedicatee, a revolutionary student, a submissive young governess for the children, a security policeman and various stoic, uneducated peasants. An opportunity to paint a picture of domestic Edwardian middle class Russian life but not much else.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While pre-World War I Moscow is carefully depicted, it is the vivid rendering of the Birch Trees that carries The Beginning of Spring past characters and plot turns that hold little interest. Older kids talk like mature adults.Frank, the main adult character, was a wishy washy father with a business soft touch who continued to deal withthe deceitful Kuriatin, again for no apparent reason or purpose.Maybe Nellie was right to get out of Russia when she did and many readers may wish that Frank had speededup things and followed her path, if not her. With her absurd desertion of her kids, her return at the very end felt very contrived.The worst is the inclusion, for no obvious reason, of the cruel treatment of the bear cub.

[japaul22 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This slim novel packs a lot in. It's early 1900s Russia, and a British family is living there, running a printing business. In the opening scene, we find that Nellie, the mother, has run off with the children, but gotten cold feet about bringing them and left them at a train station, carrying on to an unknown destination alone. Frank, the father, is left to deal with the consequences. He is also interacting with the shifting Russian politics and philosophies, and trying to find an acceptable governess at the same time. While there were lots of interesting things going on, I still sort of lost interest a few times. The setting was a little too foreign for me to connect with, and the plot kept taking unexpected turns. Overall, this was good, but not great for me. I imagine I will forget it quickly.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book about an Englishman in Moscow in 1913 is a wonderful read, for many reasons. The setting is amazingly convincing, recalling the Russia we know from the great novelists, but entirely satisfying in and of itself. The story is compelling -- why did the Englishman's wife leave him, and how will he deal with his single state -- and keeps the pages turning. The characters are unfailingly interesting (even the dull ones) and are convincing (except perhaps when a touch of what might be the supernatural creeps in). What I loved most was the atmosphere, of a city trembling on the brink of spring. One's knowledge of what happened after 1913 casts an enormous unspoken shadow, but doesn't interfere with one's enjoyment of the world of Moscow in the spring of 1913. And the book is funny. Quite wonderful.

[amusedtrain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Its fantastic

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There are really two stories in this book - the story of the Reid family, a father and three children whose mother has left without warning or explanation, and the story of pre-revolutionary Moscow in the early twentieth century, with its political fervour, traditional customs and complex social relations. The two stories are brought together in the person of Frank Reid, a Russian-born British printer, who seems always slightly out of place whether people are treating him as English or Russian. The contrast between England and Russia is one of the subtle themes of the book, as is the difficulty of two people ever really understanding each other. Perhaps these two themes go some way to explaining Frank's wife's mysterious disappearance.Frank walked past the coal tips and the lock-up depositories through the cavernous back entrance of the station. Inside the domes of glass a gray light filtered from a great height. Not many people here, and some of them quite clearly the lost souls who haunt stations and hospitals in the hope of acquiring some purpose of their own in the presence of so much urgent business, other people's partings, reunions, sickness and death.The most immediate pleasure of the book comes from the depiction of Moscow. Fitzgerald must have done lots of research but sneaks it into the pages almost in asides, so you feel that it's assumed you know as much as she does. "Like all merchants, and all peasants, Kuriatin was obsessed with the chance to cut down trees." At one time we see Frank looking for a sledge "with a driver who was starting work, and not returning from the night's work drunk, half-drunk, stale drunk, or podvipevchye - with just a dear little touch of drunkenness."There is also a certain social comedy, especially seen in Frank's habit of floating disconnectedly through complicated social situations. "In the confusion, which rapidly became the monotony, of loss it was something to have a fixed point when things must change or be changed, if only by the arrival of Charlie, That was not quite the same thing as wanting him to come, but it meant that Frank had to make arrangements and give instructions, two ways of bringing time to order." My favourite character is Frank's precocious daughter, whose matter-of-fact approach to life can be seen as a reaction to her father's passivity.It was only in the last few chapters that the book became fully-formed for me, as they reveal all the unseen threads which Frank has been ignorant of. I was most struck by one amazing chapter which is mainly a description of the family's tumbledown dacha, but at the same time (it seems to me) a description of Russia. It ends with a rather surreal scene which is perhaps the pivot of the book, loaded with political, symbolic and poetic weight which suddenly makes everything make sense.

[nickelini · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is 1913, and Frank Reid is an Englishman who was born and raised in Moscow, and now runs his family's printing business. His English wife has suddenly up and left him and he is left to raise their three children. He also has to negotiate the capricious business and social world of per-revolutionary Russia. Fitzgerald is an amazing writer in both her gift at crafting beautiful sentences, capturing bits of humour, and in creating an astounding world. How does an Englishwoman writing in the 1980s know this level of detail about Russian life at the beginning of the century? This is my first encounter with her, but I own a few others and want to read them right away. The Beginning of Spring is one of those books that require reading between the lines to figure out what is going on, and where it often feels like there is a bit missing that the reader must puzzle out. But for the reader who enjoys that type of reading experience, it's a rewarding novel. And this is what historical fiction should look like. Recommended for: readers who love rich detail, gorgeous writing, and nuance in their novels. Not recommended for those who like a straight-forward story with no complexity.

[steventx · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Frank Reid is an Englishman living and working in Moscow, the city where he was born and raised. He owns the small printing firm his father started. He has visited his native country only long enough to attend University and find a wife. It is now 1913, and Frank comes home from work one day to find a letter from his wife Nellie announcing that she has left him to return to England, taking their three young children with her. There had been no hint of dissatisfaction on her part either with Frank himself or their situation in Moscow. Frank is even more dumbfounded when he soon gets a call from the train station saying that his three children are there needing to be picked up. Giving no reason, Nellie has abandoned them at a station down the line and sent them back to Moscow unescorted. Frank is the sort of man who takes life as it comes, but now he has all he can handle. His wife is mysteriously missing. He has three young children on his hands. Moscow is a simmering stew of political unrest, and as a printer and a foreigner he comes under increasing scrutiny from the tsarist police. Moscow is a city where, it seems, everyone knows everyone else's troubles, and Frank is soon besieged with offers of advice and assistance. A would-be governess virtually stalks him looking for a job. A Russian friend wants to foster Frank's children. And his head accountant, a fellow Englishman but a Tolstoyan utopianist, virtually forces on Frank a mysterious young woman, Lisa Ivanovna, as the children's caretaker. Frank only complicates things himself by falling in love with Lisa.The Beginning of Spring is a beguiling portrait of the last days of Old Russia. It is a mixture of genuine warmth, political suspicion, quaint customs, totalitarian regulations, festive energy, and wasteful inefficiency. Penelope Fitzgerald's wry humor is reminiscent of Gogol and Goncharov. Her prose is both beautiful and concise, and her characters are marvelously engaging. The description of both the city and nature coming alive in the Russian spring is breathtaking. In the end we come to see everything with poor bewildered Frank in a new light, as he learns that he can't always depend on people being what he believes or wishes them to be.

[pennyanne_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is 1913 in Moscow and Frank Reid is a Russian born Englishman, married to an Englishwoman who has left him to return to England. With three young children to care for and a business to run, Frank finds that he must hire Lisa Ivanovna (who finds odd but compellingly attractive) as a 'temporary' governess. This book is rich with humour and with a good insight into life in pre-revolutionary Russia. Nothing is ever quite explained and the ending of the story is strangely unsatsifying while being distinctly realistic. I was given this book as a gift and hadn't read any of Penelope Fitzgerald's work before - I find that I am quite won over by her writing and will definitely look for more of her work.

[hansel714_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Penelope Fitzgerald has influential family connections, although from the book, she can certainly stand on her own. The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow, 1913, just before the Russian Revolution. It tells of the family and work troubles of a British printer who is born and raised in Russia.I like how Fitzgerald incorporates the literal into the metaphorical (or is it the other way round?): everything extraneous and illicit is dumped into the river; in Russia, there are only white birch trees. I also like how the characters are never in sync with one another as if we, the readers, are missing parts of the conversation.But don't ask me what the metaphors mean, and don't ask me what the philosophy of the book is because I really don't know.