Lehmann, Rosamond - Dusty Answer

Lehmann - Dusty Answer

"Dusty Answer" is the first novel written by the English author Rosamond Lehmann. The book was published in 1927
The author tells a story of poignant romanticism with crepuscular features.
The narrating voice is Judith, a noble soul with a tumultuous heart, inextricably linked to the five cousins ​​Fyfe, her neighbors in different years.
Loneliness, as always, will be the only trusted companion, abandoned by a distant father and a mother who has never cared for her.
One day the Fyfe will re-emerge through the confused and timeless memories of adolescence, after so many days spent between thoughts and fantasies about those unreal lives, made of dreams.

Growing up, they have changed, but they remain indifferent, when instead for her they are the breath of substance, the warmth and the only richness that life has offered her.
Losing them again will announce an imminent end, their unreal and mocking images confused with the distant desire of a happy age.
Judith will live a dream-reality alternation, having never possessed the key to access that autonomous circle (the Fyfe) and restricted to its own bond of blood. Her fantasy remains fruitful, the reality as dry as stone because someone like her has never been able to accept and adapt to "normality", synonymous with stupidity.
The years flow into the house of sadness and have the flavor of an old garden-soul correspondence, for a young girl who is always alone, who has never attended a school and peers, if not them, and who can not be among the people, terrified by a manifest abandonment.
But a new season is coming with significant changes, three years of college in Cambridge and especially her, Jennifer, an emotional whirlwind of sympathy and shine, while the small and long-awaited group in the dark near the river is destined to disappear along with the toys. childhood.
Judith does not let herself go unconscious, she remains a spectator and a commentator, for her it is impossible to look without thinking, indifferent to everything. Jennifer instead is light, magnetic, capricious, without rules, as if she wanted to replace her conscience with joy; it is an impetuous flame that runs alongside the indistinct shape of the friend.
But for Judith it's too much, too much happiness, too much beauty, that part of herself that has never managed to free along with a past that returns in a feeling not reciprocated for Roddy, in the mute suffering for Martin, in Charlie's nostalgia, in the emotional bond with Julian.
Jennifer created Judith and she ends up destroying her, demanding for herself the exclusiveness of a love.
The university years are finally at the epilogue and Cambridge turned out to be a grotesque organized unreality, everything has changed, Judith has grown and matured and her cousins, for her, have ceased to be the object of terror and anguish.