in haste...
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buy this book, it warms your heart. i am amazed it escaped my grasp for so long. sure, it's twee, there's no angst or attitude, politics or grit. amen, to that. it's a simple story about civilised people in a by-gone age, and it's true. i have since stalked the long closed bookshop. perhaps better to sit in a bloomsbury square and long for times past...
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If you love books - you'll love 84 Charing Cross Road
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This has become a favourite book for me. Told with such poignant charm, through the letters and other communications from the time. Even those letters which are obviously missing, lost through the passage of time - tell their own story. Helene's long distance friendship with Frank Doel, and others he worked with at that now famous address is a bittersweet one, and one which will remain with the reader long afterwards. Helene's love of books is infectious - and this book is therefore a must for anyone who feels strongly about the books in their home.
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Friendship with Depth and Love
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In these days of e-books, and bland books constructed from franchised ideas and formulas, we are presented "84, Charing Cross Road," a story about a relationship begun because of a mutual love of old great books.
Frank Doel owns the English bookstore, and Helene Hanff mails him a request for a book. Correspondence and a relationship begins. Contently and confidently married, Doel responds as an older brother might, and the two grow to cherish each other despite the distance.
As they care for each other, and slowly, their local friends and family become aware, we see how love transcends the sea. Neither character has an agenda, and this left me feeling a little less cynical about the world around me.
Like Nick Bantock's "Griffin and Sabine," it carries a romantic mystery and intrigue. We read the correspondence and imagine.
Like so many of today's e-mail- and chatroom-only friendships, they learn to appreciate each other, though knowing only the other as they choose to describe themselves.
This isn't a story about books or bookstores, despite the honest representation of their demeanor and personality. Any booklover knows the search for a book, and the texture of a bookseller's knowledge and connection with his books.
This is a book about the depth, trust, and love of one unexpected relationship. Book lovers will enjoy the context, and good friends will smile knowingly.
The movie with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft is likewise worth viewing, carrying the letters into a emotional zone of charm and delight.
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A wonderful book of letters
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Helene Hanff and Frank Doel's letters to one another are beautifully written and very touching. The relationship that develops between the two of them despite, or perhaps because of, never meeting is great to see. The fact that it takes so long to happen as well (over a period of almost 20 years) just adds to how deep the friendship between these two people clearly was. The second part of the book (The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street) give a touching account of Helene Hanff's eventual visit to London to promote her book, sadly after Frank Doel has died and is a good postscript to the letters (even though it is actually longer than the main part of the book).
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Heart-warming cult classic
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"84 Charing Cross Road" is a series of letters charting the twenty-year correspondence between a would-be playwright in NY and Frank Doel, a London antiquarian bookseller. From such a modest premise, Helene Hanff has created something with an almost unique charm which continues to endure as a successful book, play and film. To me the great joy of Hanff is her style. She is wonderfully conversational, humorous and self-depreciating. She describes her life - learning ancient Greek or watching endless English films - with panache. However, in truth very little happens in these pages. Rather, it is the gently teasing nature of her relationship with Doel which shines out, the feistiness of the young American lady chaffing against the more reserved nature of the quiet, polite English gent, as they read their way through the 1940s, 50s and 60s. On her death, the Times said tartly, "Seldom has a writer sailed to literary fame in so slender a craft." It is true that 84 CXR is a very slim tome. Yet it is one that bears much re-reading, as it seems that somewhere between the lines there lie more than a few life-lessons for us all. Pilgrims to the real-life 84 Charing Cross Road will be sad to find that it no longer exists as such. Look out for an "All Bar One" however and a dull, bronze plaque commemorating the bookstore.
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