| The Dancing Bear Contributor(s): Faviell, Frances (Author) |
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ISBN: 1911413791 ISBN-13: 9781911413790 Publisher: Dean Street Press OUR PRICE: $14.39 Product Type: Paperback Published: October 2016 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs |
| Physical Information: 0.49" H x 5.06" W x 7.81" (0.51 lbs) 234 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 'You don't want to mind about any of this, ' said the driver, waving a hand at the grey ruins and the greyer dust. 'In a few days you'll be so used to it that you'll like them. Berlin's a grand place I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the world, and that's a fact.' 'No more perceptive portrait of Germany in defeat has been etched in word than Frances Faviell's first book, The Dancing Bear, which made so powerful an impact upon me that I read it in a single sitting.' Guy Ramsey, Daily Telegraph 'Berlin during the decisive years from 1946 to 1949. ... The prostitution which paid so handsomely; the black market which brought in rich rewards, although it meant that the Berliners had to part with treasured possessions; the night clubs which catered for still baser tastes; the impoverished intellectuals and the starving professors and the poor who had only their wits with which to eke out a bare sustenance--all this and much else the author describes with insight, incisiveness, and realism.' Times Literary Supplement 'There is great charity in this book; there is the sharp, limpid eye of the artist; there is sound realism; and there is an unswerving, passionate desire to tell the truth." John Connell, Evening News 'They were hard and terrible times, and brilliantly does Frances Faviell describe them for us. We meet the Altmann family and follow their joys and troubles. ... The book is a brilliant pen-picture of the post-war years. We have British, French, American and Russian characters, but the background is always Berlin, and the strange tunes to which its bear danced.' Liverpool Daily Post This new edition includes an afterword by Frances Faviell's son, John Parker, and additional supplementary material. |
Contributor Bio(s): Faviell, Frances: - Frances Faviell (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London under the aegis of Leon Underwood. In 1930 she married a Hungarian academic and travelled with him to India where she lived for some time at the ashram of Rabindranath Tagore, and visiting Nagaland. She then lived in Japan and China until having to flee from Shanghai during the Japanese invasion. She met her second husband Richard Parker in 1939 and married him in 1940. She became a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Phoney War. Due to its proximity to the Royal Hospital and major bridges over the Thames Chelsea was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. She and other members of the Chelsea artists' community were often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events throughout the Blitz. Her experiences of the time were later recounted in the memoir A Chelsea Concerto (1959). After the war, in 1946, she went with her son, John, to Berlin where Richard had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration (the CCG). It was here that she befriended the Altmann Family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied. She later wrote three novels, A House on the Rhine (1955), Thalia (1957), and The Fledgeling (1958). These are now all available as Furrowed Middlebrow books. |
