Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir

Vita Sackville-West has long been a favorite, and reading these two novellas reminded me why. She is a bit like Austen, with a sharp eye for human behavior and peccadilloes, and in that not much happens in her novels, but one expectantly turns the pages anyway*.Her wry, sometimes dark and yet still gentle humor prevails in Seducers in Ecuador. Mr. Lomax has become caught up in the beauty and lack of reality that comes with wearing blue spectacles. The feelings of ease created by these spectacles accumulate in marriage, murder and the scaffold--as Sackville-West tells the reader in the first pages.The Heir is a completely different type of novella. It is love story of a man for a house. Mr. Chase, a soulless insurance branch-manager, inherits a Manor that is to his mind impractical and in need of being sold. A gradual change over takes him as he falls desperately in love with the house and yet watches the sale proceed. Both novellas are enjoyable, in Sackville-West's particular style-- seemingly gentle and unobtrusive while hiding her piercing social commentary. If you've never read any of her works, Seducers in Ecuador would be an especially good one with which to start.____________________*"Nothing very much happens in her (Austen's) books, and yet, when you come to the bottom of a page, you eagerly turn it to learn what will happen next. Nothing very much does and again you eagerly turn the page. The novelist who has the power to achieve this has the most precious gift a novelist can possess." - Somerset Maugham