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La hija de Robert Poste
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La hija de Robert Poste
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La hija de Robert Poste
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La hija de Robert Poste

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Ganadora del Prix Femina-Vie Hereuse en 1933, y mítico long-seller, La hija de Robert Poste está considerada la novela cómica más perfecta de la literatura inglesa del XX.

Brutalmente divertida, dotada de un ingenio irreverente, narra la historia de Flora Poste, una joven que, tras haber recibido una educación "cara, deportiva y larga", se queda huérfana y acaba siendo acogida por sus parientes, los rústicos y asilvestrados Starkadder, en la bucólica granja de Cold Comfort Farm, en plena Inglaterra profunda. Una vez allí, Flora tendrá ocasión de intimar con toda una galería de extraños y taciturnos personajes: Amos, llamado por Dios; Seth, dominado por el despertar de su prominente sexualidad; Meriam, la chica que se queda preñada cada año "cuando florece la parravirgen"; o la tía Ada Doom, la solitaria matriarca, ya entrada en años, que en una ocasión "vio algo sucio en la leñera". Flora, entonces, decide poner orden en la vida de Cold Comfort Farm, y allí empezará su desgracia.
LanguageEspañol
Release dateJun 14, 2018
ISBN9788417115715
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La hija de Robert Poste
Author

Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons nació en Londres en 1902. Fue la mayor de tres hermanos. Sus padres, ejemplo de la clase media inglesa suburbana, le dieron una educación típicamente femenina. Su padre, un individuo bastante singular, ejercía como médico en los barrios...

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Reviews for La hija de Robert Poste

Rating: 3.995465654171705 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Rereading it is just as satisfying as the last time. Funny, pragmatic Flora Poste sets out to organize her wayward farm relatives into better lives, and no gothic language or leering darkness will get in her way. Stella Gibbons has a thing or two to teach the Price and Prejudice and Zombies crowd about truly biting parody.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Cold Comfort Farm definitely offers an impressive Happily Ever After story, yet it is barely funny, and only enlivened by the movie featuring Rufus Sewell.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A quick re-read after watching the excellent 1995 BBC tv adaptation (only available on DVD alas). Whilst it can be read in it's own right as a witty and funny story of a clever city girl "tidying up" the very messy lives of her country cousins, it's better if you realise it's a satire on the novels of rural gloom that were popular at the time of writing - complete with ** marking the particularly satirical passages as explained in the introduction dedicated to a fictional author in that genre. Also notable is this is the source of the saying "something nasty in the woodshed". Great fun. (And do watch the film if you can - Ian McKellern, Eileen Atkins, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Rufus Sewell, Miriam Margoyles, Kate Beckinsale - all star cast!)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Amusing and colorful, but the “near future” setting was jarring. The book was published in 1932, and the events took place sometime in the 1950s, but apart from WWII never happening, lots of private planes, and one scene with a videophone, it was clearly 1930s upper-class society. Did it need to be set in the future to give Flora more freedom and independence?
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    When Flora is orphaned she finds herself in straitened circumstances and forced to write to distant relatives seeking a new home. She receives a reply from the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, offering her a place to stay, and she heads off to the country to meet these previously unknown relatives. She arrives to find an extremely odd assortment of eccentrics and yokels, and immediately sets out to reform them all, from Amos the fire and brimstone preacher to Elfine, the pixie-like youngest daughter who pines for the son of the neighboring landowner. Before Flora's arrival, all the denizens of the farm had been ruled over by the iron hand of Great Aunt Ada Doom, who never descended from her room and who is crazy as a loon, but Flora soon sets things right.I know that this is a well-loved book, and there are an abundance of favorable reviews and descriptions of rolling around on the floor with uncontrollable laughter. Unfortunately, this brand of British humor is one that I frequently just don't get on with. I was mostly lukewarm while reading this book, and never felt the slightest urge to laugh out loud. I also did not fall in love with Flora. I guess this book just wasn't my thing. Maybe it will be yours.2 stars
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    These are not words I say often, but . . . I like the movie better.Not to say the book is bad. It isn't. It's lovely and amusing, and it's an excellent satire of the fashionable rural novels and general culture of the 20s. However, the trouble with being an excellent satire of something so very specific is that the humor doesn't age well.Which is not to say that the book isn't well written or funny. It is both of these things, and some of the humor in it is humor to last the ages. What makes the film superior is that it keeps all the "eternally" funny bits while omitting those things referential to a nearly 100-year-old fad.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An amusing, tongue in cheek story that has a lot to say.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Probably would have been lower rated if I read a lot of this type of book, but as an older and somewhat strange one off, I really enjoyed it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting book written in 1932, apparently a parody of English "pastoral fiction". Writing seems surprisingly modern. If I hadn't read the intro I might mistake genre for something more along the lines of humorous chick-lit.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An over the top romp

    This book was published in the 1930s but takes place in a slightly futuristic England. It's the story of Flora Poste, newly orphaned, who goes to stay with her relatives in the country. This is where the parody comes in. In the style of books such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles, the Starkadders are a woefully rustic clan plagued by incestuous desire, out of wedlock children, and of course a crazy old matriarch. But Flora, like a meddling Emma, is determined to set everyone straight.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In which Ms. Gibbons destroys most of the forms taken by literary pretension: over description? Check. Idiotic affective-fallacy prose? 'Emotional Depth'? Tricky but pointless changes of narrative focus? Noble savage worship? Irrationalism? Hatred of convention? Realism in general? Silly attempts to bypass realism? Over-precise verbs? Check times 9. Lawrence, Hardy and a number of lesser literary luminaries are put firmly in their place, along with all their metaphors and goopy, viscousy adjectives. Light and graceful prose gradually shunts the darkness to the side. That said, I can imagine a lot of people hating this, particularly anyone who's really into their own deep and tortured soul. But hopefully this book will lead them, too, to The Higher Common Sense, while acknowledging the stupidities of self-help books like The Higher Common Sense.
    To be fair, this is not a Literary Masterpiece; it's not a replacement for reading Lawrence. But it is a reminder that sometimes life is enjoyable, even if you have to go to great lengths to make other people realize as much.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Well that was a fun little segue away from thoughts of Coronavirus. I'm sure I'm last to the party reading this one, but better late than never.Cold Comfort Farm was not at all what I was expecting. I thought that the central characters would be the inhabitants of the farm, so Flora Poste - the sassy, cultured, no-nonsense Londoner - was a surprising delight. What a wonderful character! Nothing remotely phased her or derailed her plans, and her polite but acerbic retorts to the rustic Starkadder Motley crew as she whipped them all into shape were hilarious.An enjoyable satire, although probably not a classic that will stick in my mind for too long. For some reason, the considered normalcy of cousins marrying each other sticks with me in this novel - I'm glad that we've since changed our minds on that one (at least where I come from).4 stars - enjoyable and fun, but nothing earth shattering.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    While avoiding the crux of the novel, I would like to establish how I marvel at that fuzzy future in both Cold Comfort Farm as well as Waugh's Vile Bodies. The device allows a certain breathing space, an alibi against hurt feelings and wonky segue for future wars and everyone travelling by PRIVATE aircraft.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Charming, engaging, gently amusing, but some of the best jokes have entered the popular consciousness to a degree that they feel a bit tired in the book itself. I wish I had read it younger, but I'm not sorry I read it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    As part of this year's UK Reading Challenge, I tried to read Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. It's a satire about 19-year old orphan Flora Poste who decides to go live with her distant relatives (or something) instead of getting a job and becoming a productive member of society. She DOES have a one hundred pounds a year income, for what it's worth...but living on a farm in the middle of nowhere sounds more interesting. And she could always write a novel about it. Someday.

    I tried really hard to read it. So hard. But...

    I couldn't do it. Maybe someday when I'm older, wiser, more mature...and can handle satire rooted in 1930s England. When that happens, I'll come back to it, back to the Starkadders (who comes up with these names? Oh, wait--the English), come back to a bunch of cows with names like Feckless, Graceless, and other -lesses, and swarthy men that make women swoon with all their hairy manliness...[gag].

    I'll come back to it. Later. But right now, I just couldn't handle it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked this a lot. It's a clever parody, and a funny one. Some scenes stick in the reader's head, and for all the right reasons. One fault: characters are introduced to the reader in the most brilliant way but then left 2-dimensional after. This is probably deliberate, and necessary for the parody to take hold, but it jars to see great characters left unfinished. A small fault though
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a pretty nice, weekend read. It didn't hold my attention towards the middle and was more or less predictable (as most satires are), but wrapped up nicely and kept me entertained for a few hours. I didn't think it was massively funny (as some reviewers have), but I chuckled in a few places. It was a pretty regular, only slightly pretentious comedy-of-manners.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was great. So many good lines in this book; the first line perfectly sets the tone:"The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic, and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of each other during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living."Thus, this heroine ends up on Cold Comfort Farm and what follows is a parody of rural farm novels popular in the 1930s, when this was first published. I don't think one needs to be entirely familiar with these novels to appreciate the cleverness of this book.And now I will forever wonder just what nasty thing it was that Aunt Ada saw in the woodshed.Read this for my #1001Books project, although it had been on my radar as to-read before knowing this was on the list.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I'd seen the movie previously so I had a little bit of a sense of what to expect here, but this surpassed expectations. A great parody. And I kept going to look up words only to find that Gibbons had made them up!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Hilarious - brilliantly written send up of 'pastoral' novels.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The first two-thirds of it are much funnier than the last third. Everything gets wrapped up incredibly neatly, which I suppose is the whole point, but it means there isn't a breath of air in the last pages, and you almost yearn for something to upset Flora's plans at the last minute. That said it's quite witty and clever throughout, and Stella Gibbons' sentence construction is a thing to behold: she kind of combines mid-twentieth century Muriel Spark-ish tartness with the flawless, rolling rhythm of the Victorian sentence (or something like that). I can't believe this was her first novel; it's so poised.I did wonder why the novel is set 'in the near future' and why there's all the emphasis on flying and other kinds of technologies. Just to point up the primitiveness of Cold Comfort Farm?I also wondered why all the emphasis on Mr. Mybug. I found his first conversation with Flora about Bramwell Bronte and his gin-swilling sisters the funniest part of the book, but it did strike me that you could remove his character completely from the book and not really make any fundamental difference to how it is constructed (apart from needing to find another husband for Rennet). I wondered was Gibbons making a certain point of contrasting the sanity and civilised values of the female author (i.e. Austen as a model for Flora to attempt to copy) with the irrationality and egotism and sex-obsessiveness of her male counterpart (Lawrence perhaps?). That's probably way over the top, but it did seem like Gibbons might have had a satirical axe to grind or perhaps somebody specific in mind in the Mybug scenes.I think the novel gives a glimpse into the ambivalent attitude to Jews that existed in England in the 1930s. Increasing numbers of Jews fled from Germany to other nations as the Nazis and Hitler slowly gained power, beginning early on in that decade. During the 30s increasing restrictions were brought in to limit the numbers of immigrants in several nations, culminating in the Evian Conference of 1938 where both the US and the UK refused to take further substantial numbers of refugees. I think Gibbons' whiff of anti-Semitism was found throughout literature at that time and right up until the end of WW2, when the nightmare of the Holocaust was finally revealed.I remember Lowry hinting at the same thing in "Under the Volcano" when he wrote about Hugh's experiences as a young man. D. H. Lawrence famously referred to 'Jews of the wrong sort' in one of his short stories and Evelyn Waugh certainly included anti-Semitic and racist views in his novels, although it's always hard to separate the voice of the author from those of their characters. However, Gibbons suggesting that Mayfair would become a slum containing 'Jew shops' in her near future was certainly not comfortable to read. I see such writing as a part of history and something that should remain unchanged in the text as a lesson to future generations, should they choose to look for it.This book is a satire that takes broad but, at heart, very loving, swipes at many different stereotypes. Oddly however, at the end, I felt the least affection for Flora herself as she tied up her own loose ends. But then again, that may have been the intention of the author....To me "Cold Comfort Farm", the farm itself, is the prototype of a cult sustained by the dominance and even charisma of a mad, ignorant central personage. Flora goes into the protocol, without any authority, but perhaps propped up by some unknown rights (or wrongs) due her. In any event her right to be there is not imposed nor sustained by legal compulsion, nor are her actions and remedies. The fact that she has a desire to change these people by merely interacting with them freely if not spontaneously is not reprehensible. And these are not just rural types living differently from urban types. Perhaps no one is forcing them to comply with Ada Doom, but no one is forcing them to change either. They are being offered possibilities that they did not seem to imagine possible, and in each case pursuing those possibilities seemed to enrich their lives, in ways they chose to follow up on. Offering those possibilities is hardly wrong on Flora's part. In the end this extends to Ada Doom herself. Like those who were offered a choice of change before her, Ada by her own choice chooses to behave differently. If the commune/cult had system of dispersed values, in which different individuals lived communally according to their own beliefs, they would probably not have been so easily deprogrammed.This kind of issue of cultlike behaviour, however large or small the cult, seems to me to be one of the most fundamental issues of our time, and Stella Gibbons was a true, perhaps even science fictional, visionary in this respect, intuiting on a small scale some of the religious, political, and social consequences of cults and sects and factions etc. Particularly for second or third generational members who are born into an extreme environment of belief and behavior chosen by their parents.It does have some similarities to "Emma", but Flora does not enjoy social or economic power like Emma, all Flora has at her disposal is "Persuasion".As for the parody elements, probably they are very important, but this is just a well written, interesting, and fun book that stands perfectly well on its own two legs."Cold Comfort Farm" seems positive enough, and I don't know what Gibbons' intentions were, but the Farm does vividly present to readers what seems very much a cult. And she does seem to have a powerful fascination with powerful personae. Given how potent, almost all powerful, such people were becoming, and would become, (based on personal charisma), in the modern world, the Lenins and Hitlers and Huey Longs, I find that to be the most interesting thing about the book. Sort of like "1984" or "Brave New World" in a sense. And of course, there is the explosive growth of small scale charismatic cults such as those of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, or David Koresh (Waco Texas). In the USA they abound, and while we do not read about them much here, a brief Google search seems to indicate they are not that plentiful in Europe, based on the usual suspects of religion, political ideology or just plain old sex."Cold Comfort Farm" is a very minor classic that absolutely transcends its time, place or literary heritage and I enjoyed reading it, especially since I had never heard of it or Stella Gibbons or Mary Webb, BUT I found it lacking in the genuine literary depth that Poe, Lowry, and Camus brought to the table. For me its best claim to literary substance remains its look at the all too human dynamics of the Farm and how such places can continue to be during the modern world, which Gibbons highlighted nicely by setting it in a still more modern and higher tech world of the future with telepresence and extreme possible mobility (I think that kind of personal air travel was a commonplace and common dream of futurisms in the 30s).I was thinking of Mary Poppins/Nanny McFee as well, sweeping in, sorting out and sweeping out again. I suppose I should have found Flora irritating but somehow, I didn't. I think the charm of her character made it impossible for you not to warm to her. She might be a busy-body with tremendous in sight beyond her years and a no-nonsense brisk way of dealing with everything but her actions were because she had a good heart, she cared. There were some lovely extracts, I particularly loved her description of finding each new love resembling the old one 'just like trying balloon after balloon at a bad party and finding they all had holes in and would not blow up properly' - what a weird but amazing analogy! I Flora would have made a perfect parson's wife having ample opportunity to 'sort out' the entire congregation and community. I found it a little irritating that a lot of the 'problems' seem to involve a lot of money being thrown a them and would have loved to have been present during the long conversation between Flora and Aunt Ada Doom but the line 'and did the Goat die?' was so delightfully bizarre, you got the gist that the family feud was not quite so terrible as she had been led to believe. Some of her observations of life were a bit cynical and bitter for someone still relatively young and I wondered if Stella had been let down in love. she certainly had no time for pretentiousness or for people who allowed themselves to wallow in self-pity, no matter how much they enjoyed it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love Stella Gibbons' deliberately over-the-top prose and the way she marks particularly egregious examples with asterisks, for the benefit of reviewers. The made-up farm words are fabulous and so is her complete ignorance and disregard for the actual work of the farm. The story itself is a triumph of consumerism over a more in-tune-with-nature style of life, so I ought to hate it, but can't because it's so much fun.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nearly done and LOVING it.....
    Now finished and it was great to the end. A timeless must-read for anyone who loves British humour.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It took me a long time to finish Cold Comfort Farm, mostly because I had seen the adaptation and already knew, more or less, what happens.I am glad I persevered. One thing I didn't realise from the adaptation is that Cold Comfort Farm is set in a future that never came to pass. I'm not sure if this makes it a sort of science-fiction, or a sort of alternate history... but it is fitting for a novel which sets out to parody other novels. Nobody in it is entirely real and that's kind of the point.This is a strange book, but an amusing one, and I particularly enjoyed the prose.Even Mrs Smiling could not find much comfort in the time-table. It seemed to her even more confused than usual. Indeed, since the aerial routes and the well-organised road routes had appropriated three-quarters of the passengers who used to make their journeys by train, the remaining railway companies had fallen into a settled melancholy; an idle and repining despair invaded their literature, and its influence was noticeable even in their time-tables.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    My brother saw the movie and said it was great - "very funny." So I bought the book on whim (scanning the shelves at the book store). I found it hard to read because of the language. It didn't really read "hilarious" - has a very dry humor. I have since seen the movie and have an "easier" opinion / perspective. And it's only then that I realized it was originally written in 1932 - THAT explains a LOT!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was an amusing novel, written back in 1932, as a parody of rural novels that had been popular for years.
    The heroine is an intelligent, modern young woman who unfortunately has no way to earn her living. She decides to descend on some country relations and proceeds to turn their moldering lives upside down and make things right.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Flora Poste moves to Cold Comfort Farm to live with her relatives as a ‘parasite’ after the death of her parents. She plans to fix all of their lives to her liking. The whole premise was quite silly and made for some fun interactions with her quite dysfunctional family. While most of this was funny, it was also very strange. There were sections that seemed very drawn out and then other plot points that would get resolved in a few pages. Then some of the primary mysteries you are chasing the entire book never get resolved, so I was left with a lot of questions. Then there’s the funny feeling of time period. The book reads like an Austen parody, but then there’s all these airplanes landing all over the place. So a lot of strangeness (for me anyway) but it was quite funny, and I enjoyed the read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "There'll be no butter in hell!"OK, I'll admit it: it took me a little while to get on the wavelength of this book. I received it as part of a Santa swap in December, and I asked for books that were witty and imaginative, so I had, at least, some small clue of what I was about to take in. I think I was expecting something a little more P.G. Wodehouse (whose novels are overtly comic) than what I actually read: Gibbons' novel is a parody, certainly, but it takes great pains to read on the surface like the genuine article. A lot of her humor is very, very dry; if you can fall into it, it's hilarious, but if you can't, I can see how it would be a little puzzling. Truth be told, I think that's what I felt about the film version, which I saw some fifteen years ago. I spent the whole thing wondering, "Is this a joke?"Yes. It's a joke. There are occasional little gags in the writing that should be a red flag to any reader. The most obvious, and actually one of my favorites, is the collection of cows at Cold Comfort Farm - Feckless, Aimless, Graceless and Pointless -and their habit of casually losing limbs. Once you notice that, you start to get wise to the entire book, complete with its insane made-up religious sect, its invented ruralisms ("mollocking," anyone?), and the protagonist's habit of sailing in and bringing modernity and civilization to the poor yokels. I've never spent time in the rural parts of England, but living as I do in the southern United States, there are whole sequences of the story I find laugh-out-loud funny: sometimes, it hits very, very close to home. I won't pretend that Cold Comfort Farm is always an easy read - it probably helps to be more versed in the novels it clearly aims to satirize - but it's definitely an engaging one, and I probably wouldn't have tried it without someone basically putting the book into my hands, so: thank you! I obviously enjoyed myself, because while I was sitting and reading the book in a coffee shop, an older man tapped me on the shoulder. "Good choice, right?" he grinned. He was right.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Flora is a young single woman of nineteen years who has found herself orphaned after losing her parents during a flu outbreak. Now alone with only a modest annual allotment to sustain her, and no desire to marry or work in order to support herself, she has to decide who she will choose to take her on and see to her well being.She chooses to go live with distant relatives in Sussex, who seem to feel some sort of obligation toward her, due to a mysterious wrong that was done to her father Robert Poste.My final word: I loved the description of the house in Sussex and its history, and the names of the dairy cows: Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless. This story was very symbolic. I didn't catch the symbolism at first, but by the end of the story I was picking up on it. There were odd character names, like Mrs. Smiling (who was actually a bit of a downer) and Mr. Mybug. And then there’s landmarks like Ticklepenny’s Field. Quirky and outrageous, and a bit farcical, this story had its moments, but overall it fell flat. I think it would make a much better play or BBC series than book, giving the story a little life that is currently missing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I re-read a lot of favorites this year and closed it out with the nutters at Cold Comfort Farm. I just love those Starkadders and all the satellite weirdos in the town of Howling. Flora Poste is an enviable doyenne of coolness and grace under pressure. She is also a heck of a lot of fun! This book is best read with an ironical and overly dramatic air. I doubly recommend the 1995 movie starring Kate Beckinsale and the audible (abridged) dramatized version of the novel - all equally wonderful!