Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

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Everything fits together – traditions, values, rebellion, challenges – and creates a story that is both timely and very real. This book touches on so many aspects of life that there seems to be something for just about anyone – obligation, loyalty, integrity, grief, loss, jealousy, and love. He is disappointed with his son, who has made a religion of career ambition, and considers the provincial notions of his neighbors less than cricket. It is a story that deals with religion, politics, race relations and other sensitive topics, but without proselytizing.

The only thing that knocked a star off this review for me was a slightly hackish plot device at the end, but it's such a minor thing it really only counts for half a star. Simonson has been so trained (perhaps overtrained) by American writing groups and programs (she has an M. He saw another waiter slap a male dancer across the face with his white arm towel, as if to challenge him to a duel.The village is largely untouched by the twenty-first century, and many of the inhabitants are retirees of some means. Ali, herself a widow who is just tolerated by the close minded villagers because she is of Pakistani descent. Whoever read my Olive Kitteridge rant, probably knows that I am not much into reading books about old people. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is Helen Simonson’s absolutely charming mature romance that I highly recommend in audiobook. He has preferred a style of such extreme correctness and gimlet-eyed detachment that all it takes to give this book its comic perspective is to present his point of view.

Written with a delightfully dry sense of humour and the wisdom of a born storyteller, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand explores the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of family obligation and tradition. Worse, and still more disjointed, many of the other characters seem to come from outposts of civilization in the 1930’s where people think that Mecca is a restaurant and Hindu and Muslim are the same things. And are we supposed to feel sorry for the Major because of his frightful son, or wonder at his bad parenting?Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is one of the most uplifting and rewarding literary romances I’ve read in years. If Masterpiece Theatre doesn't make this book into a movie starring Derek Jacobi, it will be a crime. Lepo opisuje i kulturološke razlike u Britaniji (između krutog Britanca i udovice Pakistanke) a i jaz i nerazumevanje među generacijama (između oca i sina). The Major (Earnest, aptly named) – Retired British Army, military attitude, and strong values, almost stuffy with an air of ostentation. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner.

Major Pettigrew is a 67 year old English widower who is trying to navigate the growing changes in the world, the dearth of discipline, the turning tide of etiquette, the lack of loyalties. This is a work of such unfulfilled and immature literary skill, that it reminds us of the words of Chaucer: "lyf so short, the crafte so longe to lerne. The Major is also quite stuffy, unwilling to break the social barriers that support community and quite pompous about people who do, but sceptical about those that create and promote barriers, especially of age, gender and ethnicity. Their friendship blossoms, then is almost derailed by an episode of cultural appropriation and prejudice. There is the valuable pair of guns that were divided between the Pettigrew brothers and were supposed to have been reunited once a brother died; scheming over the guns’ ownership becomes a major plot element.These delightful novels were set, like Helen Simonson’s “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” in a village in Sussex. And in spite of his feelings about Americans: the “assault of American vowels and the flash of impossible white teeth,” their propensity for “publicly humiliating one another” and their poor sartorial habits. If you are looking for something to read that is delightful, charming, with many layers of depth, this is a book you will love.