@screenbeard you can get any mango you like in #Thailand. I suspect the mangoes of your childhood are yellow #mangoes (#Bowen in Oz). These are eaten with sticky rice in Thailand. Most Thais prefer green mangoes which are served wit a sticky sweet and spicy chutney

*sigh

The middle part of THE HOUSE IN PARIS by Elizabeth #Bowen is becoming a bit of a drag. Karen is no Sydney Warren from THE HOTEL, possessed of some strength and character, nor the feral naif Portia Quayle of THE DEATH OF THE HEART. She's essentially just... boring? I don't much like Max either, but at least he seems to have wandered in from something more interesting, perhaps by Collette...

#books #WomenWriters

I think I will have to re-read all of Elizabeth #Bowen with pencil in hand, marking particularly piquant, saturnine or thorned passages, personalising the books until I feel I can lay some claim to having actually read them. My Muriel Spark intensive earlier this year was fun - but Bowen is something else. A serious, widdershins thinker, a demiurge-novelist.
#books #literature #WomenWriters

Continuing my #Bowen intensive with THE HOUSE IN PARIS, in which two the main characters are children. Solitary, verbally precocious children are encoutered in THE HOTEL and THE LAST SEPTEMBER, and there are the flashbacked-to titular THE LITTLE GIRLS. When Bowen zeroes in on a child, it's without condescension, sometimes with a sense of the mist of uncanniness that clings closer to childhood than most adulthoods. So, this should be interesting.

#ElizabethBowen #books #novels #WomenWriters