Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
Follow me on Instagram: www.instagram.com/thisotherbookaccount
This book is just not for me at all.
I didn’t know much about Iris Murdoch prior to reading this book other than the fact that she’s won the Booker Prize before. Nonetheless, I was hoping for this to be the gateway to the rest of her bibliography. However, if The Black Prince is a good measure of how she writes, the journey has ended for me before it’s even started proper.
The Black Prince is a tough read. It’s tough because it is the self-important ramblings of an old, jaded, neurotic writer who’s bitching and moaning about everything in his life. There’s a masterpiece he claims to have the intentions of writing, but people keep getting in the way — people, such as his ex-wife, his brother-in-law, his sister, his writer friend, his writer friend’s wife (whom he has an affair with) and his writer friend’s daughter (whom he also has an affair with). I gave up halfway, but everything up to that point is him whinging about these people interfering with his ‘brilliance’.
Just imagine The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield as a 58-year-old, speaking with the same voice on the page, going on tangents about the nature of art, then coming back to bitch some more about how useless his sister is, how much he hates his ex-wife, how much he loathes his writer friend, how he loves his writer friend’s wife, how he also secretly loves his writer friend’s daughter, and how these ‘people’ are really coming in the way of his passion — for 400 pages.
I didn’t stay for that long, of course. I couldn’t be bothered. It’s tiresome and I am moving on.
This book is just not for me at all.
I didn’t know much about Iris Murdoch prior to reading this book other than the fact that she’s won the Booker Prize before. Nonetheless, I was hoping for this to be the gateway to the rest of her bibliography. However, if The Black Prince is a good measure of how she writes, the journey has ended for me before it’s even started proper.
The Black Prince is a tough read. It’s tough because it is the self-important ramblings of an old, jaded, neurotic writer who’s bitching and moaning about everything in his life. There’s a masterpiece he claims to have the intentions of writing, but people keep getting in the way — people, such as his ex-wife, his brother-in-law, his sister, his writer friend, his writer friend’s wife (whom he has an affair with) and his writer friend’s daughter (whom he also has an affair with). I gave up halfway, but everything up to that point is him whinging about these people interfering with his ‘brilliance’.
Just imagine The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield as a 58-year-old, speaking with the same voice on the page, going on tangents about the nature of art, then coming back to bitch some more about how useless his sister is, how much he hates his ex-wife, how much he loathes his writer friend, how he loves his writer friend’s wife, how he also secretly loves his writer friend’s daughter, and how these ‘people’ are really coming in the way of his passion — for 400 pages.
I didn’t stay for that long, of course. I couldn’t be bothered. It’s tiresome and I am moving on.
3.5/5
The term "unreliable narrator" is a popular one in literature. As are "creativity", "art", and "great", words whose definitions are thrown around so quickly that the mind can hardly fix on one before another, more "truthful" one is sailing past. As if truth had anything to do with it.
Let's start with the "unreliable" part of the first term. Unreliable how? What standard of reliability do we actually have at our disposal? The simplest answer is the book itself, an answer that quickly devolves into an inescapable paradox from the purely objective point of view. As a result, one must step back from the lenses of objectivity, and trust in the states of transience that meaning undergoes for each and every occasion.
This book has an unreliable narrator. In fact, it has many, and one would go mad in the attempt to discover the "real" story based on the accounts of all of these different and differing voices. Pardon my usage of concrete ideals that belie their inherent complexity, but the story is not of real importance here. There is a story, that is true, but this story is something that was viewed through the perspectives of many human beings, each with prejudices and motives and other mental biases that warp and twist whatever observations they manage to capture from reality. It is these disconnections between whatever constituted these observations and their final rendition on paper that are of interest. Or, more accurately, just how much havoc these disconnections wreak when one comes in contact with another through that vague film of "reality".
The real chaos provoked by the clashing of abstract interpretations is even more pronounced here, in a book wholly consumed with the idea of "art". What is art? How does one define its many aspects, and more importantly, how does one come to create their own? Should one be prolific in their attempts at this most beautiful of substances, or should one wait until one has enough experience/the right state of mind/the most fruitful life opportunity close at hand?
I do not have an answer for that. But many of the characters in this book do, each as varied and conflicting as their inherent characteristics. One thing they all hold in common, though, is their ability to "clean up" the story in their recounting, shape it to a single theme that guides their individual story to their own satisfactory ends. Seemingly well-constructed interpretations are prolific here, all the more striking when contrasted with the glimpses of the most banal of realities that each writer lets slip in their own fashion.
In my mind the former interpretations, while admittedly much more impressive in terms of thematic power and linguistic expression, would not be nearly so impressive without the latter banalities. Why? Because it is this pervasive contrast between high-flown words of interpretation and the mundane "facts" of what "really happened" that is so fascinating. Especially when each narrator wishes to tell the truth, and many of them wish to do it in a way that they consider "art". Words and reality (physical, mental, sociocultural, political, rational, so many multitudes of -al's swirling about and shifting the story at hand) have equal amounts of power over each other. It only requires a small change in either of them to drastically change the results of their constant war.
One event. Two people see it. Each pens down their own version of what they believe happened. One person reads the writings of the other, and responds with a more "correct" version of the others. One reader reads all of these linguistic exercises and theoretical meanderings. One reader wonders at the discrepancies, the accusations, the drama. One reader wonders.
The term "unreliable narrator" is a popular one in literature. As are "creativity", "art", and "great", words whose definitions are thrown around so quickly that the mind can hardly fix on one before another, more "truthful" one is sailing past. As if truth had anything to do with it.
Let's start with the "unreliable" part of the first term. Unreliable how? What standard of reliability do we actually have at our disposal? The simplest answer is the book itself, an answer that quickly devolves into an inescapable paradox from the purely objective point of view. As a result, one must step back from the lenses of objectivity, and trust in the states of transience that meaning undergoes for each and every occasion.
This book has an unreliable narrator. In fact, it has many, and one would go mad in the attempt to discover the "real" story based on the accounts of all of these different and differing voices. Pardon my usage of concrete ideals that belie their inherent complexity, but the story is not of real importance here. There is a story, that is true, but this story is something that was viewed through the perspectives of many human beings, each with prejudices and motives and other mental biases that warp and twist whatever observations they manage to capture from reality. It is these disconnections between whatever constituted these observations and their final rendition on paper that are of interest. Or, more accurately, just how much havoc these disconnections wreak when one comes in contact with another through that vague film of "reality".
The real chaos provoked by the clashing of abstract interpretations is even more pronounced here, in a book wholly consumed with the idea of "art". What is art? How does one define its many aspects, and more importantly, how does one come to create their own? Should one be prolific in their attempts at this most beautiful of substances, or should one wait until one has enough experience/the right state of mind/the most fruitful life opportunity close at hand?
I do not have an answer for that. But many of the characters in this book do, each as varied and conflicting as their inherent characteristics. One thing they all hold in common, though, is their ability to "clean up" the story in their recounting, shape it to a single theme that guides their individual story to their own satisfactory ends. Seemingly well-constructed interpretations are prolific here, all the more striking when contrasted with the glimpses of the most banal of realities that each writer lets slip in their own fashion.
In my mind the former interpretations, while admittedly much more impressive in terms of thematic power and linguistic expression, would not be nearly so impressive without the latter banalities. Why? Because it is this pervasive contrast between high-flown words of interpretation and the mundane "facts" of what "really happened" that is so fascinating. Especially when each narrator wishes to tell the truth, and many of them wish to do it in a way that they consider "art". Words and reality (physical, mental, sociocultural, political, rational, so many multitudes of -al's swirling about and shifting the story at hand) have equal amounts of power over each other. It only requires a small change in either of them to drastically change the results of their constant war.
One event. Two people see it. Each pens down their own version of what they believe happened. One person reads the writings of the other, and responds with a more "correct" version of the others. One reader reads all of these linguistic exercises and theoretical meanderings. One reader wonders at the discrepancies, the accusations, the drama. One reader wonders.
"Really, Bradley, you seem to be living in some sort of literary dream. Everything is so much duller and more mixed-up than you imagine. Even the awful things are."
Bradley can't quite write that important book that he thinks he has in him. He can't quite perform as a lover in the way he imagines he should. He believes art and love and life must be excruciatingly difficult and excruciatingly emotional if they are to have value. He imagines that his thoughts are more profound than those around him, and writes books that don't get published, but nevertheless are truly "art," --unlike those of his bestselling and prolific author friend Arnold--simply because of the time and emotion he invests in his work. Publishing is not the point, right?
Most alarmingly, he imagines at the age of 58 that he is in love with Arnold's 20 year old daughter and pursues (preys on?) her. They escape to a rented cottage by the beach and there is a sexual encounter that seems to be rape: "I strode to her and took her wrist and pulled her into the bedroom and tumbled her on the bed...I put one knee on the bed and began to drag at her white shirt."Wait, wait, you're tearing it!...I began hauling down the black tights dragging them over her thighs...'Oh Bradley, please don't be so rough...' " etc., etc., and afterwards he has no understanding of what he's done. Characteristically he places the act into an unreal literary context and makes it all about himself: " 'What made you like that, Bradley?' 'The Prince of Denmark, I suppose.' ... What had made me like that?...The fury, the anger, was directed to myself through Julian and through myself. Yet of course this fury was love too, the power itself of the god, mad and alarming. 'It was love,' I said to her." And he believes it. With zero concern for Julian or recognition that he had hurt her. It is a hard passage to read.
In fact, the women are generally not treated well by the male characters. The book opens with a call from Arnold to Bradley saying that he thinks he has killed his wife. Only she's not dead, but beaten within an inch of her life. Yet the two men are cavalier about what happened, and even his wife eventually decides it wasn't a big deal. Murdoch was generally supportive of the independence of women, if not an avowed feminist, and I can't get a sense of her purpose in the way she drew her female characters.
This is a challenging book. Murdoch is a very good writer with a philosophical bent and there are long passages about art and love and human consciousness that are brilliant but not easy to absorb. She carefully constructs the story and places a fictional, non-fiction memoir within her novel. There are fictional forewords by the editor and Bradley, and postscripts by several of the characters and the editor again. And despite the dark events and tone there is a subtle humor that is pervasive and makes the narrative a kind of satire, especially of writers and editors.
All of the narrators, both the primary narrator, Bradley Pearson, and his acquaintances who write postscripts after the publication of his book, are astonishingly unreliable. None seem to be self-aware. In fact, it's impossible to discover the truth about any of them. And that I suppose is the point. Murdoch asks what truth is: in art, in love, and in life. She makes it clear that it is often very hard to tell.
Bradley can't quite write that important book that he thinks he has in him. He can't quite perform as a lover in the way he imagines he should. He believes art and love and life must be excruciatingly difficult and excruciatingly emotional if they are to have value. He imagines that his thoughts are more profound than those around him, and writes books that don't get published, but nevertheless are truly "art," --unlike those of his bestselling and prolific author friend Arnold--simply because of the time and emotion he invests in his work. Publishing is not the point, right?
Most alarmingly, he imagines at the age of 58 that he is in love with Arnold's 20 year old daughter and pursues (preys on?) her. They escape to a rented cottage by the beach and there is a sexual encounter that seems to be rape: "I strode to her and took her wrist and pulled her into the bedroom and tumbled her on the bed...I put one knee on the bed and began to drag at her white shirt."Wait, wait, you're tearing it!...I began hauling down the black tights dragging them over her thighs...'Oh Bradley, please don't be so rough...' " etc., etc., and afterwards he has no understanding of what he's done. Characteristically he places the act into an unreal literary context and makes it all about himself: " 'What made you like that, Bradley?' 'The Prince of Denmark, I suppose.' ... What had made me like that?...The fury, the anger, was directed to myself through Julian and through myself. Yet of course this fury was love too, the power itself of the god, mad and alarming. 'It was love,' I said to her." And he believes it. With zero concern for Julian or recognition that he had hurt her. It is a hard passage to read.
In fact, the women are generally not treated well by the male characters. The book opens with a call from Arnold to Bradley saying that he thinks he has killed his wife. Only she's not dead, but beaten within an inch of her life. Yet the two men are cavalier about what happened, and even his wife eventually decides it wasn't a big deal. Murdoch was generally supportive of the independence of women, if not an avowed feminist, and I can't get a sense of her purpose in the way she drew her female characters.
This is a challenging book. Murdoch is a very good writer with a philosophical bent and there are long passages about art and love and human consciousness that are brilliant but not easy to absorb. She carefully constructs the story and places a fictional, non-fiction memoir within her novel. There are fictional forewords by the editor and Bradley, and postscripts by several of the characters and the editor again. And despite the dark events and tone there is a subtle humor that is pervasive and makes the narrative a kind of satire, especially of writers and editors.
All of the narrators, both the primary narrator, Bradley Pearson, and his acquaintances who write postscripts after the publication of his book, are astonishingly unreliable. None seem to be self-aware. In fact, it's impossible to discover the truth about any of them. And that I suppose is the point. Murdoch asks what truth is: in art, in love, and in life. She makes it clear that it is often very hard to tell.
An absolute riot of a book - funny, deliciously layered, a tunnel through which a small glimpse of light can be seen (I'm being pretentious - sorry). Super good!
This book devastated me in 3 pretty distinct parts- each occupying a different part if my body, mind, and soul. I thought about reading it any moment I wasn't.
Iris Murdoch is a true artist. The complicated (but not overly-so) narrative style. The way she describes a room, or someone mannerisms. Her ability to write through Bradley about these feelings of success and failure, happiness, the dynamics between men and women, love, marriage, loneliness, art.
It moved me in a way you always hope a book might.
This book burns and, to quote it's creator, "can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence."
Iris Murdoch is a true artist. The complicated (but not overly-so) narrative style. The way she describes a room, or someone mannerisms. Her ability to write through Bradley about these feelings of success and failure, happiness, the dynamics between men and women, love, marriage, loneliness, art.
It moved me in a way you always hope a book might.
This book burns and, to quote it's creator, "can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence."
Wonderfully written but too cruel and despairing for me.
NY Times 1973 article
A well-fashioned study of narcissism and almost slapstick misunderstandings and convolutions. In the end, we question whether this story is truth or delusion - and who is the delusional one, anyway?
A well-fashioned study of narcissism and almost slapstick misunderstandings and convolutions. In the end, we question whether this story is truth or delusion - and who is the delusional one, anyway?
My third Iris Murdoch novel and I’ve loved them all, even if (or maybe because) they’re all the same. Upper middle class English people in very complicated love triangles (quadrangles, etc), manipulated time within an inch of their fictional lives to be funny and serious and philosophical. The philosophy is always a little too much for me, but I’ll take it given how good the plots are and how sharp the writing is.
a well written book full of impossibly horrible, ugly characters.
Murdoch is a pretty amazing writer. She manages to juggle lots of Big Themes at once, but elegantly, and although I occasionally felt a bit out of my depth (she's incredibly intellectual, sometimes densely philosophical), there were other moments of sheer mirth, or intense emotion, that kept me in it till the end.
After the end, though, came the postscripts, and I was not a fan of the postscripts.
After the end, though, came the postscripts, and I was not a fan of the postscripts.