Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Book Review: The Merry Widow

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: The Merry Widow


Author: Grace Nies Fletcher

Date: 1970

Publisher: William Morrow & Company

ISBN: none

Length: 245 pages

Quote: "This title was thrust upon me involuntarily by a television MC in Baltimore who was introducing me as the author of my book, What's Right with Our Young People?"

The author of In My Father's House and Preacher's Kids goes on to say that the bumptious young man first said she "looked like a schoolteacher," and then, thinking that that didn't sound "pretty" enough," rushed on to report that her extensive travels after her husband's death made her a "merry widow." Mrs. Fletcher admitted that this phrase is a bit self-contradictory, but then, she always had believed in the healing benefits of merriment. She had travelled widely with her husband, and refused to stop travelling without him.

So she wrote this book, not as a straight travel guide nor as a straight memoir, but in hopes of amusing other citizens. Possibly, she thought, inciting them to enjoy their retirement more, whether they were coupled, widowed, or single.

Like Mrs. Fletcher's other books, this one is entertaining, with dry little jokes: "The saddle was wooden with a thin sheepskin thrown over it, and when I leaped astride and felt for the stirrups, there weren't any."

"After we'd wandered about shrine-hunting for a few hours, we finally took a taxi and discovered that the directions should have been exactly reversed. Polly, who had lived here before, shrugged. 'He had to tell us whether he knew the way or not. Otherwise he would have lost face.'"

"Even the mosquitoes at Penang are polite...They don't boast, as the Bangkok ones do, 'I'm going to bite, I'm going to bite, I'm going to bite!' The Penang mosquitoes simply do their stuff and fly away, and live to bite another day."

Writing The Merry Widow seems to have cheered Mrs. Fletcher up. On the Fletchers' last flight together, the plane bumped, and she tells us that, knowing her husband had only a few days left, she "thought how pleasant it would be to die together." Still, inevitably, those of us who are born with an inclination toward merriment find it on the other side of grief. The mishaps of travel become funny. The lighter sides of work, books, people, float back into consciousness. Eventually laughter even stops dissolving into tears every time we realize that someone is no longer here to share the joke. At which point, if you were Grace Nies Fletcher, you would write another book.

The readers Mrs. Fletcher had in mind for this book were probably senior citizens, mostly female, who would have found the Red Hat Society too brassy. By now, however, the ideal reader for The Merry Widow might be anyone who's interested in the tourist attractions of Europe and Asia and would enjoy comparing the way these places are now with the way they were in the 1960s

This book is becoming hard to find; Amazon has pages for another book, and of course a music score, with the same title, but no page for this one. If you want it, click now while supplies last...

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