WENVOE COMMUNITY LIBRARY
Tel: 02920 594176 – during opening hours or wenvoelibrary@outlook.com
Like and follow us on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/WenvoeCommunityLibrary
For general enquiries you can email us at wenvoelibrary@outlook.com
Click and Collect – We shall continue to supply you with books on a click and collect basis during library closure. We’ll be at hand in the Community Centre on Tuesday and Thursday mornings between 10-12 to help you with on-line ordering and general enquiries. You can phone us during opening hours on 07526 478740 whilst we are closed and awaiting our exciting new building.
Pop-up book sales – On the second and fourth Saturday of each month, a pop-up stall selling pre-loved books, cards etc will be held on the grassed area to the front of the Community Centre from 10:30 – 12:30.
Please come and see us on the 11th and 25th of September.
Musings from a volunteer
Famous Last Words.
I must admit, I am one of those readers who will invariably turn to the last page of a novel to read the final words before deciding whether the book is for me or not. It is true that the opening sentences of a story are important, but so are the final words. A book’s last sentence is the final detail of a plot that has been presented to the readers’ imagination; it is a last chance for a lasting impression.
Some final lines have the power to disrupt and shake our expectations. Others will provide a sense of closure or leave us with a degree of ambiguity. An effective ending anchors the story in a reader’s mind long after the book is finished. Wuthering Heights, 1984, Gone with the Wind and Jane Eyre have memorable endings.
In Wuthering Heights, the narrator is in the graveyard and…(I) lingered round them under the benign sky: watched by the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in the quiet earth.
A gentle ending to an emotional roller-coaster of a novel. Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff lived tragic and tempestuous lives in total and mutual disharmony. Furthermore, their turbulent lives condemned the next generation to unhappiness. Now, however, they rest in peace and the young have moved on. Unlike many Victorian novels, Wuthering Heights has no happy ending, but the author has written a peaceful and serene conclusion for her anguished characters in describing nature at peace.
1984 ends abruptly with just four words: He Loved Big Brother.
The brief, stark and very powerful sentence establishes the inevitability of the hero’s life. He had fought the system which was engulfing and diminishing his true nature; he had loved and had been loved in return; for a brief glorious moment he had been truly free. In the end it was all for nothing. The futility of his rebellion makes his bid for freedom all the more tragic. He is once more just a faceless and nameless cog in the Party’s greater plans. His self-esteem and spirit have been utterly destroyed.
Although Reader I married him is probably the most quoted, parodied, and adapted phrase in Jane Eyre, the novel actually concludes with a quotation from The Book of Revelations: Amen. Even so come, Lord Jesus.
It is not even Jane, or Rochester who quotes this, but St John somewhere in India on his deathbed. True to the majority of Victorian novels there is a happy ending – the good are rewarded and the evil have met their just deserts. God is praised for watching over the characters in the novel and guiding them to their destiny. Jane, although never overtly religious, reaches her true destiny in her marriage to Rochester. She has achieved all she has striven for.
A young woman who somehow just cannot reach her ‘true destiny’ and the reader is left with the lingering doubt that she may never do so, is Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. On realising that Rhett Butler is walking out of her life for ever she cheers herself up with the following words: Tara. Home. I’ll go home, and I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.
Scarlett is not a likeable heroine. She is brash, self-centred, and totally heartless in her determination to achieve her own goals. The final words reveal her defiance. There is not only heartbreak, but a note of hope to rebuild what she has destroyed. In many ways she epitomises the America that emerged from the trauma of the civil war, hopeful and optimistic for a better future. But will she achieve her dream? That is something that many readers cannot agree upon.
Alina Trigger
Tel: 07526 478740 – during opening hours. For general enquiries you can email us at wenvoelibrary@outlook.com
