Score another point for the It's Not You, It's Me rating. In books as in life, I just can't get past certain character flaws. Miss Jean Brodie is the kind of teacher my high-school self would have gone positively apeshit over. Younger Me would have eaten up her determination to shirk the stifling curriculum to impart the wisdom and knowledge she felt formed a remarkable mind, hoisting her onto a pedestal made of hero-worship for having the temerity to rock the establishment's boat. That cynical bitch Older Me, however, was suspicious of her motives and couldn't shake the feeling that this tale was like an all-girl "Dead Poet's Society" with a less purely intentioned teacher and less naively worshipful students (minus the saccharine charm of departing the story before the awestruck pupils grew up to be disillusioned adults). My other problem with this one was my lingering hostility toward the type of woman Miss Jean Brodie seems to be. (Really? You're in your prime? I can't wait for you to hammer home that conversational nugget, like, 87 more times and talk all about yourself some more.) And also possibly the distracting scrawlings of the book's previous owner, which were clearly jotted-down lecture highlights littered with words' less common spellings, like "desparite" and "bicariously."I feel like I'm missing something in not better appreciating what is a much-lauded novella by being so turned off by just a small facet of the main character's personality because there was quite a bit more going on than one might expect from a deceptively slim tome. The titular lady certainly is a complex character who seemed to be preserving her own fading youth in those select girls in whom she saw protege potential (I want so badly to make a "Brodie set : Jean Brodie's prime :: horcruxes : Lord Voldemort's soul" comparison but I feel like that's just setting myself up for a rabbit hole of recreational thesising). Brodie is determined to tear through life and distill her experiences into vivid life-beyond-cold-academia building blocks for her chosen pets. I was fascinated by her ability to dedicate herself completely to whatever passion tickled her fancy at whatever point -- teaching; art; strategically placing a favored student, as a stand-in for herself, in the best position to carry on an affair with a much older married man -- without it ringing with the falsity of a passing, half-hearted fad. There was something desperate in her determination to suck the marrow out of life, though -- like it was missing the unselfconscious joie de vivre of a person truly enjoying existence with reckless abandon. She was the cat parading around her mouthful of feathers, pushing societal boundaries for the sake of daring others to take notice of her untamed ways and marvel at her free spirit.The non-linear narrative neatly packed 10 pounds of enlightening exposition into a five-pound bag; I'm generally a fan of chronological meanderings, so that was a definite plus. The Brodie set was a gaggle of foils, both among themselves and for their teacher: Their innocence and adolescence played so perfectly against the surrogate mother figure whose own purity was abandoned long ago and whose peak has already begun its decline. And I positively adored Sandy, the most prominently portrayed of Brodie's elite, even though I knew she was the obvious choice.Definitely worth the read, especially for a book I grabbed on the sole basis of its length as the end of the world 2012 loomed ever closer with my year's reading goal still unmet. I just wish I hadn't chanced upon it more than a decade too late, as I feel like this is one of those books that's a primo gauge for measuring how far one's come over the years.
Might fascism have a whimsical element? Dictators have their reasons, often unreasonable ones not guided by the facts. Hitler and Mussolini were ready to tear down Europe and rebuild it in Greco-Roman splendor. Irrational, mad, whimsical. There's an excellent 1989 documentary titled, The Architecture of Doom, that offers the provocative argument that Hitler was largely driven by aesthetics - an architectural vision to raze and rebuild Europe, following his vengeful rage at being kicked out of art/architecture school in Vienna.In "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," the title character is an English teacher rapt in an egomaniacal world of her own, at a private English school in the 1930s before WWII; her charges schooled in a peculiar whimsical sort of artsy curricula all her own, but also geared toward suiting her own self-sustaining, survival-prone political agenda. They are sort of like Hitler Youth, unquestioning and clueless, always towing the party line and never saying a bad word publicly or to anyone outside their sacred circle against their idol. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that Brodie romanticizes Mussolini's Brown Shirt thugs and Hitler's "cultured" view of classical orderliness. Brodie's is a tight-knit group, but, inevitably, one of her charges begins to see the dangers of Brodie's self-centered agenda, and becomes the Judas of sorts.The book is crisply written, wryly witty, subtly ironic in tone. It's a fast and fun read, very scintillating and brilliantly structured. Spark has a mastery over this material, even as she takes the narrative backward and forward in time, and even into the literary and whimsical daydreams of the girls, particularly her most promising student, Sandy. The fates of the girls and of Brodie are suggested in small snippets of fast-forward detail interspersed at intervals as the narrative progresses.This is no scrubbed up "Dead Poet's Society" view of the unconventional teacher and enthusiastic charges, but something closer to the nutcase English eccentric teacher from Terence Rattigan's, "The Browning Version" (play and film).Though Brodie is wont to constantly point out the deficiencies of the more "rational" science, math and fact-based, rote methods of conventional instruction offered by the others in her school, her own flighty set of teachings offer up a similarly impoverished and arbitrary knowledge set. Neither view is wholly right or wrong. Ironically, Brodie's admiration of the orderliness of fascism would seem to contradict her own ideas of beauty, and her class and herself would probably be the first on the train to the camps.The book hurtles rather too quickly to its conclusion for my taste, a lot of narrative is dispatched quickly, and the idea that all of this was merely a setup for a surrogate romantic scenario seems a little hard to swallow. But at least the book is subtler at handling this than is the movie, where the final revelations are meted out by sledgehammer. In the film's end Brodie is an out-and-out raving histrionic fascist loony, and fortunately that's not the way the book handles it. In fact there's no such scene in the book. Part of the book's historical context is the fact that fascist sympathies were fairly common in England before the war. The famous book and film "The Remains of the Day" also addressed this. In all, I loved Spark's book, was compelled to read it in less than a day. It is fine literature.
Do You like book The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1999)?
Very nearly four stars, but I can't go that high because the author doesn't provide a strong enough motivation for the girl who betrays Miss Brodie. Miss Jean Brodie is a forty-something Scottish school teacher who never tires of reminding people that she is IN HER PRIME. Someday when I have nothing better to do, I may just go through and count how many times we are told by Miss Brodie (and her girls) that she is IN HER PRIME. Meanwhile, whenever I want an excuse for my eccentric behavior, I will simply state that I am IN MY PRIME.3 3/4 stars
—Jeanette "Astute Crabbist"
I read this to add to my female authors. I like this book, yet I see why some readers don't. The title implies some sort of in-depth psychological analysis to come, and that doesn't happen. Au contraire. The fame of this novel comes from the strong authorial control over the narrative. Particularly interesting is Spark's manipulation of temporality -- she moves back and forth between present and future with unusual effectiveness. The other remarkable thing is the broad brushstrokes with which she paints her characters. This is where readers expecting a deep portrayal will be disappointed. Spark gives us adequate information, but whatever speculation about the kind of person Jean Brodie is remains the readers' responsibility.I like this approach. It's different and it works for me. The writing in the first part of the book is especially good. Take this sentence near the beginning --The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.This single statement conveys a tremendous amount of information about the story and gives a neat sample of the author's strong prose. Nine more sentences like it and she could have told a novel-length story.I recommend the book on the condition that people not expect heavy character analysis. I also think it's a good book for men wanting to add female authors -- it has good general appeal.
—Tyler
I was going to try to give a little plot teaser here, something about there being a Miss Jean Brodie, a woman in the prime of her life, who has a group of schoolchildren called "the Brodie set", and then something about how she's a sort of Dead Poets' Society-style teacher with a dark side. But every time I tried to write that, I had some trouble. So here, let me list three reasons this book is great and wonderful:1) This is a technically and stylistically wonderful book. This is one of the few books I've read where it seems utterly obvious that the author is in complete control of every aspect of the book. She writes with an exuberance that injects life into the work. Everything about it feels well-conceived but still organic.2) The characters feel life-like and the author is somehow able to pack a surprisingly great amount of six characters' lives into a 150-page book. They are charming but flawed. Their fates are all ones that you care deeply about.3) The non-linear structure is employed perfectly. The narrative jumps back and forth in time seamlessly to unfold the story in a really intriguing and unusual manner, one that the author, again, is in complete control of.
—Christopher
