February was another locked down month with a curfew in Quebec, and I was at home going nowhere. It snowed a lot. I saw a total of three other human beings in the whole month. The prevailing mood of this pandemic for many of us is “other people have it worse, but this sure sucks.” I read a perfectly reasonable seventeen books, and many of them were really excellent, which is always cheering.
This is the story of a young man with enough money to live on in London for a year and try to write, who entirely fails to achieve anything. It’s a comedy, though it is very sad, and you can see here the beginnings of the class consciousness which will make so much of Sharp’s later work so excellent. I enjoyed reading it, though I wouldn’t call it good, exactly. It also surprised me that it was 1932; it’s much more a book of the 1920s in feel. For Sharp completists, I suppose. Don’t start here. But I am excited to have so much new to me Sharp available as ebooks.