A reviewer at the Saturday Review compared Camilla to The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield and Camilla Dickinson, the protagonists in question, are a bit like Romeo and Juliet: he gets some terrific lines and flails around memorably, but she's the one who grows and matures and doesn't have an ego so huge it could eat New York City without having to open its mouth all the way.Anyway.I don't understand why Camilla isn't better known. As in, it doesn't seem to be known at all. It's a beautifully written story, first published in 1951, about a girl becoming a woman. That doesn't mean sex or love or even deciding on a career, though she does experience her first romantic interest and physical attraction in the course of the novel, and she is quite decisive about becoming an astronomer. Womanhood means the end of childhood, and for Camilla that means understanding that her parents were not put on this earth simply to be Mother and Father to a solemn-eyed girl. As Camilla puts it, "It is a much more upsetting thing to realize that your parents are human beings than it is to realize that you are one yourself."The romance aspect of this novel hasn't aged well. Frank Rowan, the boy Camilla falls for and the brother of her best friend Luisa, is a dud. He's a pompous, self-important, patronizing, sexist pig. He treats Camilla like absolute garbage. He asks her questions and sneers at her answers, probably because all he wants from her is for her to say, "Oh, Frank, that's wonderful!" Which she generally does. It's painful.Here's a perfectly representative passage. Frank has just spent the last million pages talking about his ideas about life, the universe, and everything. Seriously, his speeches go on for page-long paragraphs. I think he grows up to be John Galt. Anyway, he finally pauses for breath long enough to offer to take Camilla somewhere they can get a bite to eat.But I wasn't hungry. I shook my head. "No. But you go on and have something if you want to.""Me, you think I could eat?" Frank turned on me and his voice was suddenly savage. "You think I could eat when the minute you're born you're condemned to die? When thousands of people are dying every minute before they've even had a chance to begin? Death isn't fair. It's – it's a denial of life! How can we be given life when we're given death at the same time? Death isn't fair," Frank cried again, his voice soaring and cracking with rage. "I resent death! I resent it with every bone in my body! And you think – you think I could eat!"He looked at me as though he hated me. He jammed a coin into the slot and pushed me ahead of him onto the New York-bound ferry and stood with his arms crossed in bitter and passionate anger. He did not look at me; he did not talk. Once when the ferry slapped into a wave and I was thrown against him he pulled away from me as though I repelled him.Now, those thoughts about the people who never get anything like a shot at a real life are remarkably similar to my own teenage (and post-teen) rantings on the subject. But it's hard to have sympathy or empathy for Frank Who Thinks And Feels So Much More Deeply Than We Do That He Can't Eat when this is his response after he brought up food in the first place. His exact question was, "Want to go somewhere and have a frankfurter or something?" God only knows what he would have done if Camilla had said yes. Taken her on the ferry and promptly thrown her overboard, probably.So, yeah, the parts with Frank are rough going. And the ending isn't happy, I'm not going to lie to you.But if you were (or are) a kid who spent a lot of time wondering about the world and your place in it, and who went on walks at night hoping "to talk to someone else who wanted to be out all night walking too," and who would rather have one good friend you could talk about everything to than a bunch of friends who only ever chatted about boys and clothes – you could do a lot worse than read Camilla. Yes, it's a period piece; but so is Catcher, and Camilla's thoughts and struggles are often a lot more engaging than Holden Caulfield running around saying how phony everybody else is.
The first fifteen years of Camilla’s life have been largely comfortable—at least as far as she remembers. She and her family live in a spacious and luxurious flat in New York City, and although Camilla can see the apartments of less-privileged families out her window, the residents might as well be worlds away from her, for all the connection they have. But when Camilla’s mother begins having an affair—one about which she behaves nauseatingly coquettish—Camilla’s secure life begins to fall apart. Although Camilla’s mother pretends that her paramour, Jacques, is really courting Camilla, she isn’t fooling anybody and one day the pressure of living two lives becomes too much and she attempts suicide. It is in this moment, and the chain-reaction of events that follow, which changes Camilla’s relationship with her parents forever. Camilla begins to have a romance of her own, with the passionate and violent Frank, the emotional opposite of her cold, rational father—to a fault. This novel is a glimpse into two weeks of a life—two weeks that empathize with younger readers, and remind older ones about the fraught experience of being neither a child nor an adult, and, in the case of Camilla, demonstrate the kind of woman she will grow up to be. Like much of Madeleine L’Engle’s writing, themes of both astrology/astronomy and death permeate throughout. These characters, it seemed, are always talking about stars, death, or God—three things, I suppose, that are intimately related, and perhaps the coming-of-age thoughts of many young people, at least in the 1960s when this novel was published. I remember loving this novel as a teenager, and there were still plenty of interesting moments in it, but my adoration of the characters was one I think I could have only had as a teenager--as an adult they seem petty, immature, and insufferable; and Frank, who I was scarily enamored with as a young girl, is both physically and emotionally abusive to Camilla. Disappointing, but fascinating to reread such a beloved book of my youth and have such a drastically different response.
What do You think about Camilla (1982)?
I recently went back and reread this, which was an odd experience because I'm now much more familiar with A Live Coal in the Sea, which tells Camilla's story when she's an adult.One thing I love about L'Engle's worlds is that people actually grow up in them, and also that they're all interconnected -- Frank Rowan, who appears as a secondary but important character in this book as a teenager, shows up as a minor character in A House Like a Lotus when he's middle-aged. Camilla grows up and has children in A Live Coal in the Sea. Meg Murry has several books of her own and then has children who get several books of their own. And then of course there are Adam and Zachary, going back and forth between two universes that ought to be more connected but otherwise aren't....which is all really about L'Engle's ouevre as a whole, and here I've stuck it into my review of a book that no one's read where no one will read it.
—Ellen
A wonderful read. I liked how I was never quite sure what was going on with Camilla's parents. Because we were seeing things from her perspective, it was easy to slip into her awakening. It's very disturbing to discover that your parents are people, not just your parents. I think L'Engle did a great job portraying this realization. Of course, I was frustrated with Frank by the end of the novel. But it consoled me to remember he is only a 17 year old boy. :)Because this book has a very similar feel to A Small Rain, and even mentions music in the same way, I was happy that L'Engle chose science to be Camilla's career. Sometimes I forget when I read a L'Engle book that's written for adults that she is also the author of A Wrinkle in Time and The Arm of the Starfish. I was happy to see the marriage of awakening and her fascination with science. And I thought astronomy was a good thing in this novel. It helped to define Camilla, to understand her fascination with God, her understanding of God and her deeper self.I'd recommend this book. Looking forward to revisiting Camilla in the sequel, A Live Coal in the Sea.
—Jes
'Oh, my gosh. Why did I just waste those precious minutes?' is what I thought after I read this book. 'Why was I tricked into thinking that Camilla would be interesting? Because she's wearing a blue coat and red scarf?' Aside from the quirky color choices, which I must credit to the illustrator and not to Camilla, I couldn't bring myself to like Camilla, and I didn't necessarily see her maturation process through the story...and isn't that what a coming-of-age novel is supposed to be all about? The ending...well, let's not get me started on the ending. 'Disappointing' is the least of it. I am going to sell this book back. Soon.(However, I couldn't bring myself to give this only one star because that would be putting it on the level of "Through A Glass Darkly" and nothing by Madeleine L'Engle deserves that.)
—Chennijen
