Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village

by Ronald Blythe, Matt Weiland (Introduction)

Overview

Woven from the words of the inhabitants of a small Suffolk village in the 1960s, Akenfield is a masterpiece of twentieth-century English literature, a scrupulously observed and deeply affecting portrait of a place and people and a now vanished way of life. Ronald Blythe’s wonderful book raises enduring questions about the relations between memory and modernity, nature and human nature, silence and speech.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590178317
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	09/22/2015
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	255,528
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Ronald Blythe was born in 1922 in Suffolk, England, where his family has lived for centuries. He is the author of some thirty books including works of fiction, criticism, memoir, and social history, and has served as editor for a number of novels, poetry anthologies, and diaries. For the past twenty years he has written a weekly column for the Church Times about daily life in the Suffolk village of Wormingford, where he lives. He is the president of the John Clare Society and in 2006 received a lifetime acheivement award from the Royal Society of Literature.

Matt Weiland is a vice president and senior editor at W.W. Norton & Company. A former editor at Granta and The Paris Review, he is also the co-editor, with Sean Wilsey, of State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The New Republic, and The Nation, and he contributed the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States by George R. Stewart.

Editorial Reviews

Still the best portrait of modern rural life in England, subtle and compassionate.

BBC Wildlife Magazine

Though he's published other books mostly in his native England, Blythe will always be remembered for this contemporary masterwork: an oral history of a rural English village composed in 1969, before the form became a domestic trend. As Blythe explains in a recent preface, his goal was simply to write from within the community he depicts as "an indigenous voice," not as a visiting anthropologist. Kirkus recognized Blythe's achievement as "a real-life Spoon River Anthology," with 49 varied speakers all confronting the changing face of agricultural England. "Behind their words," we said, "pulses the eternal rhythm" of the seasons, and nostalgia by the old and enthusiasm by the young. Identifying the pseudonymous town as largely Charsfield, Blythe today notes a "recovered respect for nature" by its present-day inhabitants. Back in 1969, Kirkus praised this "cinéma vérité in prose" as "an evocative and provocative social documentary." Today, we might see it simply as a work of art.

Kirkus Reviews

His style was informed but conversational, erudite but never pedantic; he displayed none of the typical autodidact’s flaunting of his own hard-won knowledge.” —Clay Risen, The New York Times

"Ronald Blythe conducted the fifty-odd oral histories that make up his portrait of a (renamed) village in rural Suffolk with an exceptionally sharp eye for poignant situations and an equally fine ear for telling phrases. Every one of his interviews is a compact drama of identity—often riveting in itself, and always contributing to an idea of community that is at once coherent and varied." —Andrew Motion, The New York Review of Books

“Ronald Blythe lovingly draws apart the curtains of legend and landscape, revealing the inner, almost clandestine, spirit of the village behind. His book consists of a series of direct-speech monologues, delivered by forty-nine Suffolk residents, and interpretatively linked by the author. The effect is one of astonishing immediacy: it is as if those country people have looked up for a moment from their plow, lawnmower or kitchen sink, and are talking directly (and disturbingly frankly) to the reader. This is a brilliant and extraordinary book which raises disquieting second thoughts when the poetry has faded—as Mr. Blythe says, it is like a ‘strange journey through a familiar land.’” —Jan Morris, The New York Times Book Review

“A hundred years from now, anyone wanting to know how things were on the land will turn more profitably to Akenfield than to a sheaf of anaemically professional social surveys.” 
—The Guardian

“For all its quiet and subtlety, Akenfield documents the disappearance of an entire mode of civilization. Like the artist he claims foremost to be, he animates the countryside, gives it color and depth. He turns 'quiet streets of old houses' into 'huge clear spaces,' and finds the ordered, evolving poetry in everyday speech and feelings.”—John Lingan, The Baffler

“You will never be the same after reading this exquisite and revelatory book. You are caught by this chronicle, by the words of non-celebrated villagers. You do not hear them talking; you hear them feeling. It is life sung out by the celebrants of themselves.” 
—Studs Terkel

“...one of the really great books of the decade.” —Harrison Salisbury

“Here is a delectable book; a book to linger over and cherish, every page of which compels fresh thought and lets the reader actively participate in an attempt to understand and evaluate the life of one East Anglian village in the nineteen sixties.” —Edward Candy, The Times Saturday Review
 
“A superb documentation of the changes which have revolutionized modern England.” —The Atlantic
 
“Exquisite.” —John Updike
 
“Still the best portrait of modern rural life in England, subtle and compassionate.” —Roger Deakin, BBC Wildlife magazine
 
“The community of Akenfield remains wild, mysterious, glorious, petty, and finally beyond reach...What makes the villagers what they are? What is their future? The life-likeness of the book leaves the questions far beyond the range of facile answers.” —The New Republic

From the Publisher