Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) | 
| Author: Stella Gibbons
Creators: Roz Chast, Lynne Truss
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 10833
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0143039598
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780143039594
ASIN: 0143039598
Publication Date: March 28, 2006
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Product Description
A hilarious parody of D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardys earthy, melodramatic novels, the deliriously entertaining Cold Comfort Farm is very probably the funniest book ever written (The Sunday Times).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
Cold Comfort Farm warms you in all the right places July 14, 2008
It is incredible to think that this little book was written over 75 years ago, but stays as fresh and funny as the day it was first published.
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, is a darkly comic, tongue in cheek, parody written in 1932.
Upon the death of her parents, the newly impoverished Flora moves in with relatives, the Starkadders, who live in what we would now consider squalor, on Cold Comfort Farm. There she encounters all sorts of eccentrics and sets about turning their lives around.
It is a slim volume but extremely good; humorous and sends up all those earnest melodramas so popular at the time it was written. It is a very English book and initially may not appeal to all American readers, but is one of the few books that improves upon re-reading. If you don't get it the first time, leave it a few months and then read it again. It is absolutely worth it.
Not all the ends are tied up, and what the dotty aunt experienced in the woodshed is left to your own imagination.
Wonderful. April 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
One of the funniest books I've read. I'm ashamed I'd never heard of it until a friend turned me on to the film. It's one of those books I'll pick up again every couple of years, and it still makes me laugh.
The weird futuristic theme is a bit of a drawback - it's unnecessary, and a little confusing the first time you read the book. But it's easy to ignore. I'd like to know why the author decided to set it in the near-future - was it trendy at the time? Or a parody of something going on in the popular literature of that time, that I'm just not well read enough to quite understand?
 cold comfort farm January 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Lovely book. Funny and entertaining. Say the movie first so had some preconceived ideas about the characters but was able to enjoy the differences. Entertaining on a number of levels.
Rural Gothic January 2, 2007
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
The humor of this glorious funny book resides mainly in Gibbons' masterly control of prose style; if you have only seen the movie, you know less than half of what the author has to offer. Yes, she creates a wonderful gallery of extraordinary characters, and the story clips along nicely if rather predictably, but it is the author's language that really gets you laughing out loud. Written in 1932, the book is a parody of a certain kind of rural melodrama popular at the time, but of the authors mentioned by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as models only D. H. Lawrence is still read today. But no matter; there are strong echoes of Hardy and the Brontes as well, and anyway the language works just fine on its own. It ranges from gothic descriptions of a landscape primeval and stark, throbbing with the fecund sap of plant and beast, to gnomic sayings delivered in a rural dialect so thick as to be incomprehensible if one did not realize that half the words in it were probably made up by the author. And, as an added incentive, Gibbons has helpfully marked her most purple passages with two or three stars, "according to the method perfected by the late Herr Baedecker."
Flora Poste, twenty, fashionable, well educated, and recently orphaned, decides against working for a living so writes around to various distant relatives asking them to take her in. She decides to go to live with the Starkadders, some distant cousins whose alarming address is Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Sussex. (This will seem less odd if you know English place-names, and throughout the book Gibbons' choice of names is both almost plausible and brilliantly absurd.) The farm is described in the first of the starred passages, beginning thus:
"Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm. The farm was crouched on a bleak hill-side, whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away . . . ".
The extended family she meets there, all with short biblical names of Old Testament force, is equally dour, and the living conditions are primitive to say the least. The household is presided over by the matriarch, Great Aunt Ada Doom, who "saw something nasty in the woodshed" as a child and has barely emerged from her room since, but terrifies the others into submission for fear of completing her descent into total insanity. But Flora determines to take the farm and the family in hand, beginning with the youngest, the nature spirit Elfine, and working up to the old woman. The manner in which she does so forms the plot of the rest of the book.
The gothic style which the author handles so well depends upon the ability to evoke impending doom, and Gibbons virtually redefines the verb "impend." So the first half of the novel at least is superb. However, as light and warmth are brought into Cold Comfort Farm, the doom begins to dissipate. In nineteenth-century terms, Gibbons' influence changes from Bronte to Jane Austen, whom she can certainly match in witty observation, though at the loss of the gothic elemental power. The plot, too, lacks suspense; everything that Flora undertakes to do works out with few surprises; the main parody element at the end is the neatness with which it all does work out, even including the resolution of Flora's own romantic needs. But in exchange, as others on this site have mentioned, Stella Gibbons achieves a transformation of a different kind: the forbidding cast of caricatures to whom we are first introduced has become a family of real people, whom Flora finds herself caring about quite a lot. And the reader too. Skill of this sort takes Stella Gibbons beyond the ranks of a mere parodist and reveals her as a true novelist.
[I actually read the book in the older Penguin edition, which has a fine cover, quite relevant to the period, taken from a painting by Stanley Spencer. But it is rather sloppily printed. The Penguin de luxe edition (which I have seen but didn't buy) is much better produced, and has the added bonus of a cover by Roz Chast -- a masterly match-up of two funny women working eighty years apart.]
Remember those books you hated reading in Eng. Lit? July 25, 2006
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
This is the book that makes marvelous fun of them. If you slogged through Wuthering Heights and Tristram Shandy and Jane Eyre and The Mayor of Casterbridge or Return of the Native wishing someone would just smack some sense into someone or have a little normal fun, this is the book for you. And if you loved those books, you'll love this one even more. Gibbons attacks the Gothic and Pastoral novels on their own turf and turns them on their ears while delivering a few good jabs at the Modern Novels of the 1930s to boot. Literary humor so good it'll make you giggle and snort and want to read aloud.
This particular edition, while it has the most awful cover art on the planet, happens to have very nice introduction by Lynne Truss--the author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves--which gives some wonderful and funny background on Gibbons, her life, times, and writing. It's also amusing on its own and great info if you're stuck writing book reports.
There are some oddities to this book in which a "near future" England of 1938 has no hints of World War II, but that makes it so much more delightful. It is a book that exists in a bubble just like the worlds of the stories Gibbons lampoons so well. Cold Comfort Farm is a literate and intelligent piece of writing that is also hilarous and great fun to read.
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