You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
One of the greatest tragedies of my existence - one that takes place inside of my head - is an event that occurs in this book.
Despite the excellent insight, religious and social ideas, allusions to Browning, Shelly, the Classics and the Bible, I cannot get over the morbidity of this book and I'm afraid it will never leave my mind. I do not recommend this book to any sensitive people.
Hardy is quite the amazing writer though.
Despite the excellent insight, religious and social ideas, allusions to Browning, Shelly, the Classics and the Bible, I cannot get over the morbidity of this book and I'm afraid it will never leave my mind. I do not recommend this book to any sensitive people.
Hardy is quite the amazing writer though.
dark
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
wtf Thomas Hardy. He really said ima make my last novel the most depressing book you’ve ever read.
I mean, it was beautiful but I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy again. And the plot twist???? I’ve literally never read anything like that in a classic. The last book was just 100 pages of pain. Who hurt you Thomas????
I mean, it was beautiful but I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy again. And the plot twist???? I’ve literally never read anything like that in a classic. The last book was just 100 pages of pain. Who hurt you Thomas????
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
i am writing this review somewhere between an existential crisis and a caffeine-induced breakdown. this book tore me apart and reassembled me incorrectly. i have so many feelings i don’t know where to keep them. in my chest? in my spleen? probably in the same metaphorical grave as jude’s dreams.
where do i even begin? jude the obscure is not just a tragedy—it’s a slow-motion philosophical unravelling. of a man. of love. of belief systems. of institutions. of hope, if we’re being honest. it is the kind of novel that stands at the edge of a crumbling society and dares to scream—not about kings, nor saints, nor grand heroes, but about a stonemason who wanted to read latin.
jude fawley is one of the most painfully tender, delusional, idealistic characters ever written. he is the everyman who believed in education like it was salvation, in religion like it was truth, in love like it was redemption. he is the embodiment of what happens when the world denies you again and again until even your dreams start to feel like sin. he is not noble in the conventional sense. he is not powerful. he is not even particularly successful at being tragic. and that’s the point. hardy wanted a tragedy of a common man, and my god—he delivered.
sue bridehead. oh, sue. the most complicated, contradictory woman i have ever read. ethereal and intellectual, sensuous and repressed, modern and ancient all at once. she feels like a woman written with a trembling hand and too much truth. she is both jude’s liberation and his ruin. sue’s arc is a treatise on gender, sexual morality, spiritual guilt, and the brutal consequence of not fitting into the molds the world keeps forcing on you. she is the woman who thinks too much, feels too much, and is punished for both.
arabella donn deserves more criticism than she gets, and also more sympathy. she is manipulative, yes. calculated. earthy. practical. everything sue is not. but she is also a survivor of a world that rewards cunning and punishes vulnerability. she’s the shadow-side of femininity in a patriarchal society. hardy writes her with a kind of brutal honesty i can't help but respect.
richard phillotson, meanwhile, is perhaps the saddest of the “minor” players. a man whose dignity is strangled by convention, who releases sue when he thinks it’s the right thing to do, only to have that moral act completely collapse in the face of a judgmental society. he is both victim and agent of patriarchy. he tries to be good—and fails, because in hardy’s world, trying to be good is rarely enough.
this novel is a razor-sharp indictment of every institution hardy saw as oppressive—marriage, the church, the education system, victorian morality, industrial capitalism. jude is punished for aspiring. sue is punished for thinking. the children are punished simply for existing. hardy wasn’t just writing a tragedy; he was diagnosing a disease.
marriage in this book is not romantic. it’s not sacred. it’s a trap. a social contract soaked in hypocrisy and sanctioned misery. religion isn’t a balm; it’s a battleground between desire and shame. education isn’t a ladder—it’s a wall. hardy’s critique of oxford (thinly veiled as christminster) is so bitter, it practically drips with salt.
and perhaps most interesting of all is how deeply darwinian the novel is in its undertone. there’s no divine justice here, no moral order. jude and sue do not suffer because they are bad people. they suffer because they’re born into a structure that is rigged against them. this isn’t just tragedy—it’s naturalistic tragedy, where fate isn’t written in stars but in systems.
hardy’s prose here is the kind of language that sits on your skin long after you’ve stopped reading. it's dense, poetic, melancholic—and sometimes infuriatingly bleak. he describes emotional states like they’re landscapes and spiritual crises like weather patterns. it's not always easy to read, but it's always honest. there is something about the rhythm of hardy's writing that makes even the most painful scenes feel inevitable.
and that ending—
i genuinely sobbed. not the pretty kind of sobbing. the "clutching the book to my chest, making wounded animal noises, blaming thomas hardy for my dehydration" kind of sobbing.
i genuinely sobbed. not the pretty kind of sobbing. the "clutching the book to my chest, making wounded animal noises, blaming thomas hardy for my dehydration" kind of sobbing.
this was hardy’s last novel. after jude the obscure, the public and critics attacked him so viciously (there were rumors that a bishop burned the book) that he turned away from fiction altogether. and that’s telling, isn't it? that a story which told the truth about the everyday brutality of social systems was too uncomfortable for its audience. that hardy’s tragedy wasn’t about a king or soldier or saint—but a working-class man with a dream—and that was too much.
hardy didn’t just write a novel. he wrote an autopsy of victorian society. he saw the systems and the people they crushed, and he wrote about them with clarity and compassion and fury.
if you want to read a book that will wound you, that will make you want to shake the characters and hug them and scream at the universe and question the very concept of hope—this is the book.
if you want to understand how society can kill a man without ever touching him, this is the book.
if you want to read literature that feels like both prophecy and confession, like both poetry and indictment—this is the book.
if you want to understand how society can kill a man without ever touching him, this is the book.
if you want to read literature that feels like both prophecy and confession, like both poetry and indictment—this is the book.
read jude the obscure. but only if you’re ready to have your heart shattered.
Boy meets girl, they fall in love and marry, live happily ever ever. No wait, this is a Thomas Hardy novel, not going to happen in this one. I couldn't even make a guess at what inspired the author to write this work, perhaps an article in the paper or combination of articles. This would have been a controversial work from Victorian England due to subject matter. The protagonist Jude doesn't get much of a break in this one, it's extremely tragic and if an author were to be put on trial for excessive abuse to a character, Hardy would be guilty. I still found the book exceptionally well written, you could not imagine where the story was leading to ahead of time, several times I experienced a jaw dropping unexpected turn of events.
Little Jude Fawley wants to be a scholar, unfortunately he was not born to the proper family. Unable to break free from his social standing, Jude's dreams of education and social success dies out and he finds himself married to a manipulative and oftentimes nasty woman.
The heartbreak of this story is haunting. To see how far someone can be pushed before they break. Everyone has their limits and we see the members of the Fawley family hit their limits one by one.
Like many books of this era, we deal with social status and the constant struggle within the lower class. We see manipulation between husband and wife, desperation and in the end acceptance of ones lot in life.
The heartbreak of this story is haunting. To see how far someone can be pushed before they break. Everyone has their limits and we see the members of the Fawley family hit their limits one by one.
Like many books of this era, we deal with social status and the constant struggle within the lower class. We see manipulation between husband and wife, desperation and in the end acceptance of ones lot in life.
I recommend this book to people who are already in love with Hardy's writing, and won't flinch at the awful things that can happen therein. The Wikipedia page on the author suggests that the book's negative public reception helped cause Hardy's retreat from novel writing. If so, what a tragedy. In it's questioning of Victorian social conventions, especially marriage, it's decades ahead of its time. Be warned: it tricked me into thinking it might end with and with uncommon optimism for his books. This is not how it turned out. If a wonderful journey, however, a portrayal of human suffering that could help us put into context the misery we might suffer in the present.
I took away one star because I felt the the story punishes non-conformists, to stay on the bookshelves for the time that it was written. Little children born out of wedlock get killed in a murder-suicide by one of the children. They are a plot device to punish the main characters for being non-conformists.
When I see it written that the book was horrifying to the Victorian audience, I sense that the objection was not the murderer/suicide of children, but the main characters having children out of wedlock.
And perhaps this is why Thomas Hardy gave up novel writing. Perhaps he looked back on it and said to himself, how screwed up is this that a violence crime is acceptable in a book but a happy nontraditional family is anathema?
I took away one star because I felt the the story punishes non-conformists, to stay on the bookshelves for the time that it was written. Little children born out of wedlock get killed in a murder-suicide by one of the children. They are a plot device to punish the main characters for being non-conformists.
When I see it written that the book was horrifying to the Victorian audience, I sense that the objection was not the murderer/suicide of children, but the main characters having children out of wedlock.
And perhaps this is why Thomas Hardy gave up novel writing. Perhaps he looked back on it and said to himself, how screwed up is this that a violence crime is acceptable in a book but a happy nontraditional family is anathema?
my jaw is on the ground and my heart is under it????
challenging
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes