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Barbara Comyns
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Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead Kindle Edition

by Barbara Comyns (Author), Brian Evenson (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 203 ratings
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“Comyns’ novel is deranged in ways that shouldn’t be disclosed.” —Ben Marcus

This is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, “quacking their approval” as they sail around the room. “What about my rose beds?” demands Grandmother Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a bunch. Then the miller drowns himself . . . then the butcher slits his throat . . . and a series of gruesome deaths plagues the villagers. The newspaper asks, “Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?” Through it all, Comyns' unique voice weaves a text as wonderful as it is horrible, as beautiful as it is cruel. Originally published in England in 1954, this “overlooked small masterpiece” is a twisted, tragicomic gem.
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  1. Print length
    133 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Dorothy, a publishing project
  5. Publication date
    November 1, 2010
  6. File size
    2838 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in 1954 and largely overlooked in its time, Comyns's dark novel begins in the midst of a devastating flood in a small English village. As the "ducks through the drawing-room windows" the Willoweed family surveys the damage. "Grandmother Willoweed" ("a dreadful old black bird, enormous and horrifying, all weighed down by jet and black plumes") shares the estate with her preacher son Ebin, recently made a widower, his three motherless children and their servants, a handyman called Old Ives, and two domestics. Shortly after the flood, several villagers become afflicted with a mysterious illness, causing some to commit suicide. When the pitiful Ebin loses one of his children to the sickness as well, he becomes determined to sever ties with his family's insufferable matriarch and, he hopes, improve his life. Evenson notes in his introduction that Comyns's "third person narration is quite democratic in terms of who it chooses to attend to" and indeed she shifts perspectives from the Willoweeds to various doomed members of the community with the ease and dexterity of a natural storyteller. Her dark, nightmare-inducing imagery makes for an unforgettable read, then and now. (Nov.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review

“Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.” —The Guardian

“Comyns has a pictorial eye, and though she wrote stories from a young age, she originally thought of herself as a sculptor and painter...[her] wild but exact style is always instantly recognizable, a mix of looseness and compression.” —Jé Wilson, The New York Review of Books

“Comyns’s own witchy way of looking at the world arises from her resourceful craft—her wordsmithery—which like a spell or a charm gives her fiction a unique flavor, and has won her a cult following.” —Marina Warner

“Comyns is one of those writers you can barely believe ever goes out of print. Her books are so funny, so exact, so twisted, you imagine their appeal would last for generations. Luckily for us, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, originally published in 1954, has been rescued by the new publishing project Dorothy.” —Jessa Crispin, PBS

“An aberrant pastoral as smart as this one could only come from someone with a biography as nutty and wonderful as Comyns’s.” —Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review Daily

“Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead keeps the reader guessing by freely switching point-of-view characters, flowing in and out of characters’ heads from paragraph to paragraph in a way that makes a small town haunted by mysterious illness feel like one infected organism. . . . Thanks to NYRB and the Dorothy Project, Comyns’ days of being underrated in America are over.” —Chicago Tribune

“The reason the censors might once have been afraid of this book is the reason we should rejoice in its publication: In Comyns’s lack of moralizing is freedom for the reader, and from that freedom comes change, including an increase in moral complexity, intellectual range, and truest empathy.” —PEN America

“The real trippiness of the novel—about an English village struck by a mysterious epidemic—lies not just in its eye-rubbingly bright details, but also in its moral sensibility. Flood, fire, madness descend on Comyns’s characters without any of the usual narratorial handwringing, occasionally accompanied by ducks. Comyns is so matter-of-fact as to be surreal, and irresistible.” —Lorin Stein, The Paris Review Daily

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0145652TS
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dorothy, a publishing project; Reprint edition (November 1, 2010)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 1, 2010
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2838 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 133 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 203 ratings

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Barbara Comyns

Barbara Comyns

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
203 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

sb-lynn
5.0 out of 5 stars If you love quirky British novels, (and who doesn't) this one is for you
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2012
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Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

This novel is in most part about the Willoweed family who live in a rural English village. The time period is the late 1800's. The Willoweed household is ruled by their malevolent old matriarch referred to as Grandmother Willoweed. She is rude, loud, and incredibly mean-spirited. But she is in control of the money and thus rules the roost. Her son Ebin, a "slothful man", once held a job as a journalist but lost it due to his own malfeasance and incompetence. He is now dependent on his mother for everything and as such he must defer to her and follow her wishes. Also in the household are his three children, Emma (who dreams of courtship and romance), Dennis (a shy young boy, often ridiculed by Ebin), and Hattie, the youngest, who is obviously half-black although no one wishes to comment on that and the fact that this meant Ebin's deceased wife must have cheated on him. Hattie is Ebin's favorite, not the least because she seems the most fond of him.

Although the story centers around the Willoweeds and their two abused maids, Eunice and Norah, we are also introduced to a very typical village full of eccentrics and oddballs. But when a mysterious illness starts attacking many of the villagers, the story takes a darker turn when the investigation begins as to what is causing it and what must be done to make it go away.

I just adored this book. It is a very quick read - easily read in one sitting. It's quick not only because of its size (under 200 pages with large print), but also because it is a page-turner. What I loved most is that the story would go back and forth between the comedic and the tragic - sometimes in the same paragraph. The characters are all so quirky and yet so real and we see the story from different points of view. If you are a fan of quirky British novels, this book is for you.

If you haven't read Barbara Comyns before, I really recommend you give her a try. She is a terrific writer and you just can't go wrong reading her books.  The Vet's Daughter (New York Review Books Classics) s another winner from her..
12 people found this helpful
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Mary DeMay
4.0 out of 5 stars " One complaint of Who Was Changed is that something pretty major happens in the last chapter of this book ...
Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2016
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Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead begins with a flood, a sort of harbinger to the dread that fills the town in the weeks that follow. A madness spreads which inflicts the townspeople with hallucinations and a want to self-terminate.

Meanwhile in the Willoweed household, Grandmother Willoweed rules terror over her home. She is a nasty old woman with a phobia of walking over property that is not hers, so only her son, grandchildren, and maids are prone to her fits of terror. This book is about escaping from Grandmother whilst the rest of the town is caught up in the spreading sickness.

This book was once banned in Ireland because it was "held to wallow in repulsiveness." It's true, there are horrifying images of suicide, murder, and dead things. However, the narration is in a childlike, simplistic style that lightens the darkness of this novel. The grotesqueries were laughable at times due to the author's voice. For instance, the self-inflicted gash cut across the butcher's neck "resembled a smile."

One complaint of Who Was Changed is that something pretty major happens in the last chapter of this book and is summed up in just two or three paragraphs. It was like watching an amazing movie that ends non-climatically with text blurbs explaining, "so and so has since done this and that."

Though the ending was trite, the in-between makes this book worthy of a good summer read.
8 people found this helpful
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Leslie
5.0 out of 5 stars Just what I needed to help cure my book slump
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2019
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Liked this story, quick read. I Capture the Castle and Once Upon a River came to mind. I especially loved the design and size of the book, very satisfying.
One person found this helpful
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No Shock. No Awe.
3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2018
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Light read.
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Builder Lady
4.0 out of 5 stars This is a fun little book
Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2015
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This is a fun little book. As I understand it was inspired by a real life event in a French village, Pont Saint Espirt, in 1951. Very well written with characters like you've never met before. Is humerous and serious at the same time.
One person found this helpful
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Hestia D
5.0 out of 5 stars A Surreal, Macabre Black Comedy!
Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2004
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In a small village a flood causes some death for animals and humans. The bizarre nature of a small English village flames out as the first deaths are followed by more and more of an increasingly disturbed and shocking nature. The realistic depictions of death and violence make the few acts of love and humor stand out in the novel. The novel challenges our respect for death, showing us how the thrust for life and a person's deep immersion in their own living enables us to resist horror and death. Is this hypocritical, practical, heartbreaking, or admirable? We are challenged, amused, shocked, and disgusted in this short but transforming read.
14 people found this helpful
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Bud Ryerson
4.0 out of 5 stars Things happen
Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2015
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The world is a rare and wondrous place. Children are relatively innocent. Older folks are more corrupt. All life is disturbingly precarious, and people can behave rather badly at times. Beauty is everywhere. Things happen.
4 people found this helpful
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Larry Fineberg
5.0 out of 5 stars DON'T WAIT; JUST READ IT!
Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2014
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Ms. Comyns was a great minor talent, but the word minor is misleading. She didn't write large, like Lear on the Heath, but she wrote intensely, not without humor, and with a particular vision rather like focusing a small telescope, and intensely! Her book takes place in a village after an unexpected flood, and is so arresting it's like being swept up in a strong current and carried away. It can't really be a film, but if Walt Disney was alive, and still daring, he would do it as an animated cartoon and it would be a classic forever. If you aren't hooked after 2 pages, you probably hate "The Wind In The Willows". Possibly not for very young children, certainly for adults, or any 10 year old with imagination and an inquiring mind.
7 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Brooke Fieldhouse
5.0 out of 5 stars Dreamlike metaphysics of Under Milk Wood meets the existentialism of The Magic Roundabout
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 17, 2022
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A note between the epigraph page and the first chapter page reads: ‘TIME, summer about seventy years ago, PLACE, Warwickshire.’
Daunt Books' elegantly designed and reprinted volume of BARBARA COMYNS’ novel WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD tells us that the book was originally published in 1954 and a little research reveals that it was written after 1951. That would put the action – a sudden flood, a mysterious and terrifying plague ‘the madness’, and how it changes the WILLOWEED family – as taking place in the 1880s. But village Doctor Hatt has a car – a yellow one at that, so unless it’s imported that’s unlikely. There’s also something rather streamlined about the language EMMA, daughter of EBIN WILLOWEED - a miserably repressed man financially dependent upon his abusive ear trumpet-wielding mother – her younger sister Hattie and the maids Norah and Eunice use which would seem to point to a post Edwardian era. As the narrative unfolds, ‘the madness’ takes its grip and the villagers go ‘ape’, there’s a tantalising reference to the current ‘King George.’ Not in 1880! Ah, but wait a minute, supposing that time inscription wasn’t by the author but has been put there by the publishers Daunt Books in 2021 – 2021 minus seventy is 1951. Bingo! There’s your King George, except the ambience still doesn’t feel right. It’s not until page 168 – seven eighths of the way through the book that we get dramatic proof of what age we’re in. It comes in the form of a letter written by Ebin to the Daily Courier newspaper accepting a permanent job and thus assuring him of freedom from the terrible and tyranical reign of his mother. Ebin it seems has been supplying the Courier with written pieces about ‘the madness’, ranging from an eye witness account of the village butcher slitting his own throat, to hearsay testimonies of Old Toby being ‘burned to a cinder’ at the hands of a mob, and the screaming baker’s wife running through the village clad only in a tattered pink nightgown. The real, real date, I’m not going to tell you. To find out you will have to read – or at least acquire a copy of this strange novel whose mood is neither full on horror, nor is it slapstick black comedy. Comyns’ descriptive and storytelling style harks of the existential smugness of the UK children’s tv programme of the 1960s The Magic Roundabout combined with the dreamlike metaphysics of Under Milk Wood.
Whether the note about TIME is contemporaneous or whether it was added by Daunt doesn't matter. The reason I pick on it is that time is what this novel is all about, it's a saga but all squashed into one summer, three generations of a family and how it changes. Make no mistake, I didn't give it 5 stars for nothing. It's unique, and it's priceless.
It may well be the stuff of Grimm’s fairy tales but it’s no coincidence that a mass poisoning at Pont Saint Esprit – supposedly originating from hallucinogen-producing adulterated flour in the village bakery – took place in 1951 three years before publication of Comyns’ novel.
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Woolco
4.0 out of 5 stars Curiously Stimulating
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2015
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At times, oddly, I was reminded of Richard Brautigan's 'In Watermelon Sugar': an insular, tight-knit community - superficially attractive - visited by freak events and violent episodes. Elsewhere Comyn has been likened to Barbara Pym, which is perhaps more apt. (More twisted and playful, I would suggest.)

It's the first Comyn novel I have read and I have to say I enjoyed it. Refreshingly surprising in its graphic relish of unpleasant/phantasmagorical images and scenes most authors would respectfully overlook, the novel is a curious mix of upper middle class gentility and downright gleeful horror show.

Ultimately it ends up happily comic but its an eerily detached, ethereal resolution. Haunted by the too many easy, brutal events that have gone before. Curiously stimulating!
5 people found this helpful
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SW One
5.0 out of 5 stars Good books to give to a teenage girl
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 23, 2017
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Barbara Comyns was an artist and novelist of the mid 20th century. She is not very well known nowadays and this is one of her most obscure novels. It was banned in Ireland for some years although I can't think why as any accounts of 1950s Ireland far outweigh the cruelty and lunacy described in this book. A theme which runs through all of Comyns' fiction is cruelty - cruelty to unworldly women and children, most explicit in the Vet's Daughter but very apparent here. The portrait of a miserly self-righteous old woman is vividly alive. There are so many similar depictions in Comyns' other books that I think she must have experienced this in real life. She had a Swiftian eye for absurdity and also for the self-serving horror underlying respectable society and is well worth discovering or rediscovering. Good books to give to a teenage girl!
6 people found this helpful
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Princessecho
4.0 out of 5 stars Good read until .....
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2021
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I was really enjoying this book until it made a mad dash toward the end :(
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Mrs. C. A. E. Ross
5.0 out of 5 stars Comedy and originality in an epidemic.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 21, 2021
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This is a wonderful book by an astonishingly good writer, Barabara Comyns, who deserves to be better known. From its first image, of the ducks swimming into the big house in a sudden flood, it teems with life and originality. It concerns an apparent epidemic, where people are randomly struck down, and yet she somehow makes you laugh in a rare combination of tragedy and comedy. The story races through in a lively manner so that many of the people's lives are dramatically changed. I really enjoyed this book.
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