THE ORDINARY READER
Sir-D. Hall, in his review of Ivy Compton Burnett’s works, writes of the ordinary reader as semi-mythical. I should say that an ordinary reader was one who read as naturally as he ate or breathed, as he dreamed or thought, as he talked or listened; and who took advantage of the author’s opening of certain doors to enter another’s mind. Fortunately there are still many ordinary readers, but unfortunately authors are tending to write for the extraordinary reader: those who read to review, those who read to digest a book and make it more "wholesome" for the public, and those who read to find material for radio talks and plays-not to mention those who look for points with which to pierce holes in other people’s skulls to infiltrate their own doctrine. I have read several of Ivy Compton Burnett’s books as an ordinary reader and have found them smooth, easily and quickly read, though I have reached the , age when even the gawkish expression of a genuinely felt emotion pleases more than the most brilliant and wellcut epigram. As the reviewer writes, she has created a world of her own, but I doubt if she has, created her own characters. The children could have come straight from Saki’s pages. In fact many of her adults have never grown up: "They take their revenge but the bitterness of their wound is not assuaged."
AN ORDINARY READER
(Dunedin).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19490902.2.12.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 532, 2 September 1949, Page 5
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239THE ORDINARY READER New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 532, 2 September 1949, Page 5
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