From the Bookshelf of Retro Reads…

A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep

Rumer Godden

Start date: January 25, 2021

Finish date: February 24, 2021

Discussion leader: Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂

Why we're reading this: autobiography of Rumer Godden
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Feb 05, 2021 Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-memoirs

4.5★

My head is spinning after reading Rumer Godden's impossibly full life - well part of her life. This book finishes in 1946 when RG (as I call her) was only 39.

I will certainly be looking for the other parts, including the ones written with her elder sister Jon Godden

Growing up in India (where RG had an injury more serious than first realised), a disastrous (for RG & her sisters) return to England, where the girls didn't fit in, back to India, where in spite of injury RG ran a dance school, a ...more

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Jan 22, 2021 Moonkiszt rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: books-libraries-reading-bks-on-bks, race-felt-it, geo-jolly-old-england, adults-authors-explaining-stuff, journey-from-point-to-point, storytelling-tradition-fam-folklore, celebrity-featured-holy-notorious, wars-and-rumors-of-war, resulted-in-a-lot-of-googling, writerswriting

Discovering Rumer Godden has been one of the great joys of the last five years. Since I was 4 or 5 I had been looking for her, although I didn't know it at the time. At a babysitter's house I had found a book in rough shape, without covers and without its beginning and end. There was no name or author of the book. But it had lovely pictures, of dolls - different kinds, and their story - for they were alive! Thanks to a combination of GoodReads and Facebook, a New Yorker read my fragmented story Discovering Rumer Godden has been one of the great joys of the last five years. Since I was 4 or 5 I had been looking for her, although I didn't know it at the time. At a babysitter's house I had found a book in rough shape, without covers and without its beginning and end. There was no name or author of the book. But it had lovely pictures, of dolls - different kinds, and their story - for they were alive! Thanks to a combination of GoodReads and Facebook, a New Yorker read my fragmented story and suggested I look for author Rumer Godden, and perhaps her book The Doll's House. It was a fantastic end to one of my lifelong mysteries! A new author gained and a friend as a bonus!

That brings me to my desire to learn more about Rumer Godden and read as many of her books as I can find - to see if I am as in love with her as I think I am. There are a number of biographies of her, but I found a 2-parter, an autobiography, of which A Time To Dance, No Time To Weep is the first.

Rumer was raised during the British Raj period, and was in India during most of her growing up years. She was sent back to England for boarding school, but hated it and was able to write her way out of England and find her way back to India, specifically Kashmir. Although life was difficult here, hard to birth and raise children here with a reluctant spouse who is seems to mostly check in to beget those children, she loves the place. You can feel it in her writing. She brings the atmosphere and mystery of the places she writes about, and as one reads, it spreads itself off the page into the reader's world.

As an autobiography goes, it feels very self-conscious and includes more about familial relationships than I was really interested in. Perhaps this was a work more for her family than readers of her books - it really doesn't seem like her family really appreciated her work and so she doesn't really focus on more than whether a particular writing was accepted and published. She does mention a few things about what might have prompted what setting, when. Her relationship with her sister seems to have been important, but also full of competition and comparison.

Autobiographies are always a little suspect, if you ask me. Biographers do a better job of balance (unless they don't!). But balance doesn't ever seem to be the goal of an autobiography - often is more about justification and explanation ("why I did what I did, and why I was right" or "I am the victim here and that *finger point* is the villain"). Hence the 3 stars. Her books (so far) are better writing than this work, in my opinion. Still, interesting stuff.

I'm looking for the 2nd part of her autobiography. ...more

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Feb 10, 2021 Elinor rated it really liked it

No autobiography could be boring when it involves such a fascinating life. This one covers the first half of Rumer Godden's 90-year span on earth, in which she is raised in India with all the privileges of the wealthy; attends boarding school in England; returns to India where she starts a dance school, of all things; marries and has two children before the scoundrel deserts her and leaves her penniless; takes her little girls to a bungalow in the mountains of Kashmir where they have many advent ...more

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Feb 14, 2021 Carolien rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, 2021, non-fiction, india

I have read a number of books by Rumer Godden and many of those are based on her experiences growing up in India. It was therefore interesting to read the context of those settings and events and how she matured as an author.

The autobiography covers only the first part of her life between birth and the end of WWII and she had a remarkably full life with extraordinary experiences in that time. ...more

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