This was the story of a weird love between Madeleine Cullen, a wealthy, middle-aged, Irishwoman and her pet hawk. She ignored her "wild children" and Irish aristocrat husband in favor of her hawk. The entire story takes place in 1929, in just one afternoon in the garden of Madeleine's friend, Alexandra, a wealthy young American living in Chacellet, France. I did not see a lot of plot, the story is told through the dialogue of the characters. This was pretty boring! I gotta stop reading novellas and/or short stories! But hey, am cleaning off those shelves. The cover is also odd, and I've spent too much time trying to connect it to the story. 136 pages ( )

Very nicely done, the sort of thing that'll appeal to people involved in crafting something, while also causing them/we to feel a little ripped off. As even the introduction points out, making a hawk into a symbol isn't much of a novelty, nor is the Anglos-abroad (Wescott does make me want to read Henry James, which is a mark in his favor), nor is the ever so slightly farcical country-house plot.

So, to justify my own enjoyment of this, I'm forced to interpret the book thusly: the hawk is not, in fact, a symbol for anything, and the point of the novel is the narrator's failure to discover anything worthy to be symbolized by the 'symbol'. The hawk exceeds all of Alwyn Towers' life experiences, his thoughts, and his feelings; the hawk certainly exceeds the experiences, thoughts and feelings of its Irish keeper and her husband. Any romantic, idealizing, transcendentalist attitudes fail to capture the real danger and magnificence of the animal. In short, this is a short novel about the writer's failure to produce a work adequate to its subject--while, at the same time, it's a perfect little gem of a book. ( )

Brief, elegant, edgy, and profound, I found myself enraptured by this little gem. I was quickly taken in by the narrator's voice, and while not much happens, there is an incredible tension in all this not-happening. A masterpiece of restrained narration. ( )

A quiet masterpiece; a single afternoon, drinks, conversation, scandal, and a hawk. Maugham admired Wescott's prose, and reading this you can see why.

My YouTube review is here: https://youtu.be/XCZyivmZ07k ( )

Regarded by a longstanding cult audience as a minor masterpiece, it is hard to come to this book objectively. I think without the reputation I would not have made it beyond the first few pages of this very short novella because the style is so mannered: short sentences, often broken into little clausal fragments - paragraphs frequently concluding with elaborately conceived apothegms. Wescott's narrator is staying with a female friend at her French country house. They are visited by a somewhat eccentric Irish couple, the female half of which takes a hunting hawk everywhere she goes. Tensions develop, there is some byplay among the three servants. The hawk causes a disruption. That is all. But it is observed so carefully and described so exquisitely that one becomes drawn in and fascinated. Michael Cunningham's introduction to this edition is helpful. ( )