Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez
'A world in decline it might be; but it was still a world in which you could hear Eliot, Forster, and Virginia Woolf discussing James Joyce.'
A short and delightful book written with perfectly lilted prose that tells the story of Virginia and Leonard Woolf and their lives in London and Sussex in the years leading up to World War 2, all told through the eyes of their pet marmoset, named Mitz.
There was, for my taste, a little too much anthropomorphism, but otherwise I really loved this book. It is a tale of two writers, and what it means to be a writer, and what writing entails for those who earn their living writing. It can be easy to idealize the life of a writer, but for so many it is blood from a stone; they wreck themselves to finish a book, and then have to do it all over again. This book is about those writers.
Do I recommend it? Well, it’s a book about a literary scene in pre-War London written by a fabulous writer about two other fabulous writers. It is at times hilarious and other times almost unbearably sad. It is about art and growing old and dying young and war. Plus: monkeys. All in just over 120 pages. What else could you want?
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