The Snow Ball: The Dazzling Christmas Classic by Brigid Brophy

The Snow Ball: The Dazzling Christmas Classic Reviews

• 
  Hugh

  This book was on display at Waterstones before Christmas, and I picked it up initially because I had seen Brigid Brophy's name recently, and that was because Iris Murdoch dedicated a novel to her. Once I saw that the introduction was by Eley Williams and the blurb quotes came from Isabel Waidner and David Hayden among others, I couldn't resist buying it. I was a little horrified to discover that some idiot in marketing had appended "The Classic Christmas Romance" to the book title here. Brophy deserves better, as this is far more than a romance and is set on the night of a New Year masked ball, so has very little relevance to Christmas either. The book owes much to Mozart, and is inspired by his opera Don Giovanni, but it is the writing that stands out, and its playful irreverence.
  
  There is very little plot to speak of - the book is all about mood, atmosphere, artifice and desire. The whole story occupies a time span of around ten hours. The main protagonist Anna has come to the eighteenth century ball dressed as Donna Anna (who appears in the first scene of Mozart's opera), and much of the book centres on her encounter with a masked man dressed as Don Giovanni, whose real name we never learn.
• 
  Antoinette

  This is one of those well written, clever books that just did not happen to grab me.
  
  The whole book takes place on New Year’s Eve through to early New Year’s Day. The Snow Ball is a masquerade ball. If you know your operas (I do not) this book is a take on the Don Giovanni opera by Mozart. There is a man dressed as Don Giovanni and he meets his Donna Anna. Will he be able to seduce Donna Anna- that is the primary question. There are other people who flit in and out, but these two are our main focus.
  
  The book is very artful, very elaborate in its set ups but it left me cold and ready to move on.
  
  I read this book for an upcoming course. I am hoping I gain more insight after the lecture.
  
  Published: 1964
• 
  Jess

  The Snow Ball could be the lovechild of Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf: trippy and fluid, existential and erotic, funny and witty.
  
  A hedonistic comedy of manners, it is also excruciatingly detailed; I found myself schooling my impatience on more than one occasion. I couldn’t decide whether I loved it or hated it. (Evidently, I settled on the former.)
  
  This is certainly not for everyone; nebulous and a little difficult to grasp.
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  In this witty comedy Brophy channels her inner Ronald Firbank and comes out smiling beneath her sly masquerade. Set in a large Victorian house in the (presumed) 1960s, various guests assemble for a masked ball on New Years’ Eve dressed as characters from popular literature and opera and the like. Among the cast are Anne and Anna, who meets the masked Don Giovanni, from Mozart’s opera of the same name, and finds herself embroiled in a canny mirroring of the tale throughout the snowy evening. Teenagers Ruth and Edward also perform their own romantic dance that night, ending with an unsatisfactory encounter in a Bentley. A comedy of manners, the baroque descriptions and charming dialogue mirror Firbank, who Brophy admired enough to revive in her critical profile,
  Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography in Praise of Ronald Firbank. Brophy seems to don new masks and styles in each of her novels, making her a BURIED writer to look out for.
• 
  Paul Dembina

  Although the blurb claims this was a "scandalous" book on 1st publication I doubt it would raise much of an eyebrow these days with it's subtle evocation of lesbian love.
  
  However that's not the point. This is a witty tale of several sets of star-crossed lovers set at a New years Eve costume party. I enjoyed the word play very much, for some reason it reminded me (slightly) of Peter Greenaway's film The Draughtsmans Contract in that respect.
  
  I'll be hunting down more of Brigid Brophy's work in future
• 
  Jonathan

  Oh man, this was a lot of fun. Such a strong sense of intelligence and wit behind every sentence.
• 
  Lesley

  A book I admired more than enjoyed. Clever, witty and intellectually pleasing, but it left me cold. Probably just me / wrong book, wrong time etc - I probably could have read this under different conditions and loved it.
• 
  Jenna

  Picked this up at McNally Jackson because: (1) the cover design is eye-catchingly gorgeous, (2) any friend of Iris Murdoch is a friend of mine, and (3) how could a little novel about intrigues at a masquerade ball not be up my alley? The Snow Ball is sublimely well-written, intelligent, learnèd, and compellingly suspenseful: I just plowed through it because I had to know how it ends. But I do wish the author had challenged the protagonist's worldview a bit more -- I was rather disappointed when she seemed to end in more or less the same place where she began.
• 
  JacquiWine

  A playful, seductive book, shot through with a captivating sense of wit. In essence, Brophy is riffing with the themes of Mozart’s celebrated opera Don Giovanni, reimagining the relationship between the titular character, DG, and Donna Anna, the young woman he tries to seduce. (As the opera opens, the attempted seduction has just taken place, but its success or otherwise remains unclear.)
  
  To read my review, please click here:
  
  
  https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2019...
• 
  ladylassitude

  Dull, pretentious, over complicated. Only glad it was short
• 
  Miki

  Reread: January 2024. Just as great as I remembered it!
  
  While browsing around Waterstones in Belfast at the end of October, I saw a beautiful book with a white cover, its title in gold font, framed by mint green, dark pink and gold curlicues. It was The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy. Curiosity piqued, I read the back cover and discovered that it’s not a Christmas tale but a New Year’s Eve one! The summary is short but was detailed enough to entice me: “When Anna is kissed by a mysterious stranger at a NYE masquerade ball, a dance of seduction begins.” Does it ever.
  
  Using allegory and allusion, Brophy uses Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s famous opera Don Giovanni to frame the protagonist’s storyline. Anna attends her friend Anne’s opulent ball dressed as Donna Anna, the woman who is seduced/assaulted by the title character in the opera. The mysterious stranger referred to in the synopsis is dressed as Don Giovanni, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that—at the stroke of midnight—Don Giovanni (the character in the novel) passionately and aggressively kisses Anna.
  
  In spite of some heavy subject matter—aging and death—what follows is a lighthearted romp of a good time interspersed with some retrospective conversations and smart dialogue. And although Anna is preoccupied with the passing of time as some are at the beginning of a new year, she is looking for some fun! Her mixed emotions play out in astute observations of the guests, her friend’s Rococo-styled home, excess, and sex. Yes, lots of sex: readers are privy to seemingly innocent conversations about mint creams (candies) when they’re given a quick history lesson: according to Greek mythology, Minthe was a wood nymph (
  https://naturalsociety.com/mythology-...). Ah, Brophy. You were a clever girl.
  
  The story is, if nothing else, playful: Rococo art is known for being asymmetrical, a reflection prominent in the two characters Anna and Anne; the characters Donna Anna and Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera and Anna (dressed as Donna Anna) and the unnamed male character dressed as Don Giovanni, including their relationships; and the deaths in the opera and the story.
  
  Now, say you’re not interested in doing the legwork to feel like you understand the complexity of this shorter fiction—that’s okay. I think you’d still enjoy it because Brophy plays on the complexities of our (western/European) beliefs that people have, throughout history, perpetuated but also exploited for their own gains, specifically women and their sexual liberation. How does this relate to the story? Well, the central question in the opera Don Giovanni is whether or not DG (Don Giovanni) seduced DA (Donna Anna). If he did seduce her? Well in the 18th century, an unmarried woman willing sleeping with a man was still frowned on, to put it mildly. But if he didn’t seduce her, then he must have sexually assaulted her. But as Dr. Brompeus (a character in The Snow Ball) tries to impress on anyone who’ll listen to him: to ask the question about whether DG seduced DA is to ignore the culture and ideologies prevalent during the 18th century, culture and ideologies that were still around in the 60s and that are, sadly, still alive and thriving today.
  
  By the time the story comes to an end, it’s very clear that Brophy used the masked ball to play with ideas of fantasy versus reality, perceived reality versus reality, letting go of inhibitions (playfulness and frivolity), duplicity, fetishes, and ornamentation.
  
  If you enjoy reading about desire, sex, philosophy, Mozart, observing others (not in a creepy way though), and NYE masquerade balls, then this could be the book for you!
  
  I’ve now listened to Brophy’s masterpiece (republished by Faber & Faber in 2020) on audio three times, and I’ve loved it more each time I’ve read it. Shawn the Book Maniac and I chatted about this publication. Now that the video is live, I’ve included the link
  here.
  
  [Audiobook, Scribd]
• 
  Dickon Edwards

  Proof that Brophy not only wrote her novels in very different styles from each other, but in different styles of camp. I have to admit I prefer the Joycean camp of In Transit and the Firbankian camp of The Finishing Touch. The Snow Ball is more a naturalistic and sedate type of literary camp in comparison, but as Eley Williams's new foreword points out, it's still 'a camp refiguring of canons of Western art'. In terms of what it sets out to do, it's a work of art.
  
  The foreword is also worth reading for a neat demonstration of how Williams's 2020 style differs from Brophy's 1964 style - EW has a more surgical yet playful obsession with words. In The Snow Ball, writes Williams, there are 'words as frescoes, carefully wrought in sentences such as "the walls’ plumbness she had turned into plumpness", so that the trompe l’oeil of a dripping filigree or the swing of a New Year’s Eve pendulum can be traced in the letter b’s transformation into a p.’
  
  There is (incredibly) no mention of dripping filigrees or pendulums in the Brophy book - that's Williams. It's a nice reminder that Brophy's spirit continues in living writers like Williams, and indeed in the work of Isabel Waidner, who supplies a quote on the back flap.
  
  This 2020 paperback edition by Faber is highly welcome: a gorgeous (anonymous) swirl of colours on the white front, with luxurious cover flaps, all suggestive of the peppermint creams that punctuate the titular ball. Hopefully the same treatment can soon be given to In Transit and The Finishing Touch - and perhaps even Prancing Novelist, which Williams includes in a list of further reading. Will people who enjoy this book be seeking out a 600 page study of Ronald Firbank? I can only dream.
• 
  Annabel Wearring-Smith

  In ‘The Snow Ball’, Brophy takes the heady, lusty, excitement that comes with new love and mingles it with the exuberance, decadence, and hedonism of New Years Eve. Set at an 18th C Masquerade party in a faux Baroque/Rococo Georgian mansion, this book has all the opulence and excess you’d expect of such an occasion/setting. Erotic, ecstatic, existential and stylistically particularly bizarre, ‘The Snow Ball’ was a short swirling treat to set off the new year with.
  
  The worst thing about reading this novel was that I started it on NYE in 2020 and it reminded me of actually being able to see people. I’ll definitely try to reread this another New Year, and probably remind myself I don’t like big parties that much anyway!
• 
  Ygraine

  a surprise ! this made me Taste frothy champagne and spun sugar and chocolate-mint and grainy meringue and the first snowflake you catch on yr tongue and the lingering burnt-coffee aftertaste of existential dread. also maybe a hint of peach a la the labyrinth ballroom scene ? decadent & ornamental & artful & slightly horrible.
  
  
• 
  Subashini

  An ornate masterpiece. Sensual, wicked, clever; its dark heart glittering. So pleasurable and original and weird. It's quite nice indeed to end the year with this gem.
  
  *(Bonus: Having Jessie Ware's "What's Your Pleasure?" playing on repeat while you take occasional breaks from this just to savour the world you've entered.)
• 
  Melissa Joulwan

  Wowie wow. What a weird little book! I don’t even know how I feel about it or what I just read. More later when I figure it out. I don’t even know how to assign stars...
  
  Update:
  I think I love this crazy little book. Love the way it captures the strange, manufactured optimism and breathlessness of New Year's Eve. Enjoy the three romantic relationships and their various approaches to seduction. It's super sexy without being graphic, tawdry, or eye-roll-y. And there were a few points that made me hoot out loud with glee for the language and audacity. I listened to the audiobook and the narration was *chef's kiss& fantastic.
• 
  Helen McClory

  A charming novel, I devoured this in a single day. I don't know anything about Don Giovanni, but enjoyed the dreamy, frantic atmosphere of the ball very much.
• 
  Troy Alexander

  Exquisite!
• 
  Melanie

  Probably 3.5 stars for me. An interesting read. Lyrical, witty and seductive. Would recommend as something different.
• 
  Erica

  highbrow midcentury romance novel with some wry existentialism thrown in. not my thing
• 
  lw

  3.5*
  
  I was gonna be generous and give it 4 stars for its goodreads rating but that last chapter was just baffling. 3.5* either way
• 
  Sophie Woodhouse

  like an episode of gossip girl, in the best way
• 
  Sophy H

  This is another that I'm going to have DNF.
  
  The story just feels way too fragmented and slow for me to have any interest in it.
  
  I'm going to leave it unrated as I feel it unfair to provide a rating when I haven't read enough to warrant one.
• 
  J M

  I wanted to like this more than I did. In her favor, Brophy has a sharp eye for detail, a clean/compressed style, and plenty of Shouts & Murmurs-y wit and sarcasm. Unfortunately, The Snow Ball is also airless, self-conscious/-satisfied, and (Jesus H.!) pretentious. It feels like an outline for a Donald Antrim novel mad-libbed into being by Muriel Spark’s Miss Brodie - or, perhaps, by a pack of newly “cynical,” cigarette-puffing Bard sophomores w/fond memories of prep school Met Opera day trips. Most of the dialogue reads like dead-eyed Algonquin Round Table scraps, and the characters act as unusually paper-thin authorial mouthpieces, even for a (semi-)satire. (Seriously… we’re talking George Bernard Shaw levels of Important Story Exposition/Framing uttered by dull literary automatons.) While it has its moments - the relationships between women in this book, when not twitching under the weight of 1000 bons mots, tend to be compelling and intricate - The Snow Ball is, at heart, a stylish slog built for folks who recite their SAT scores at dinner parties. I’ve heard other Brophy novels have a more playfully Joycean bent, so I’m willing to give her another shot; that said, as Ball’s “look at me” gruel of high-lit conceits made for an exhausting Intro to Brophy class, it will likely be a while.
• 
  Benedetta

  Its such a brilliant little thing, it’s nearly a novella it’s so quick and smooth to read. I can’t believe it ever had to be dug out by Faber finds!