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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I've been thinking more about this book lately especially the part where not to spoil but the phrase is because we were so many -- the tragic consequences of government interfering in people's private lives and making laws about what should be private choices. Strange that a book written so long ago should feel so hauntingly relevant today.
This was the first Thomas Hardy book that I read, quickly solidifying him as my favorite author in high school. Upon later reflections I found the evident tragedy of its protagonist a bit to strong for my tastes, preferring instead the quiet devastation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the resigned ambivalence of the reddle-man in The Return of the Native. Still, a favorite book of mine.
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicide
This is one of those books that takes you straight into another time and place. Hardy is such a vivid writer, you can feel and touch and smell and see across the places he describes.
It is crushingly sad, but the truth of the situation is psychologically real and mature, born out of extreme frustration and despair at the social reality of the time, the limitations of class and poverty. He was angry, and his passion saturates the book. The dysfunctionality of the characters is all too familiar and believable, the self-deception, the misplaced loyalties, the character flaws they can't get past, the real experience of poverty and failure. How many people have you known who didn't or couldn't live up to their youthful dreams, never made use of their most obvious talents because of a lack of education, money, connections, resourcefulness, early parenthood?
It is crushingly sad, but the truth of the situation is psychologically real and mature, born out of extreme frustration and despair at the social reality of the time, the limitations of class and poverty. He was angry, and his passion saturates the book. The dysfunctionality of the characters is all too familiar and believable, the self-deception, the misplaced loyalties, the character flaws they can't get past, the real experience of poverty and failure. How many people have you known who didn't or couldn't live up to their youthful dreams, never made use of their most obvious talents because of a lack of education, money, connections, resourcefulness, early parenthood?
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reading this reminded me that i'm living in a pre-victorian society. or at least working in one. by the way, it features one of the most horrifying scenes in all of literature. it left me cold.
2.5/5
I still have Far from the Madding Crowd on hand. It shall be saved for a few decades farther into the future, when I will be able to view it from a different generational perspective.
I am not a man who wants to save himself at the expense of the weaker among us!A word of advice to wannabe novelists: don't build a sob story character on the backs of far more desperate plot lines. In the effort of making a single complex portrait that seeks to inspire empathetic commiseration, you run the risk of using tropes as buffering without giving them their due. Now, one can write a work of some quality without deity level insight à la Evans/Eliot and such, but that requires strengths and minimal screwing ups in the other areas of fiction. Saturated melodrama, shoddy dialogue, and a message of main character far more interested in (him/it)self than any of the other cultivated personas makes for a sentimentality that shuns the majority of the audience that would give it humanity's power. Obviously, enough of the audience raises this up, judging from the novel's status as a classic, but it is not likely to survive as long as several of its kin.
Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That's what some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he is only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him.The world may one day reach the state described in the quote above, but it was not that way then, and it is not that way now. Where Jude cannot enter the university because of poverty, Sue cannot enter because of her existence. Where Jude cannot find an equal out of misguided ideals, she cannot find one because of socialized expectations of selling her body for every survival in life. Whereas Jude has problems of inconclusive education and a poorly paid career, Sue has a complete cutting off from patriarchal support, a world that does not want what she, as a she, has to give, and an inherent lack of infrastructure when it comes to picturing her self outside the boundaries of domesticity, religion, and sexual assault. Couple this with Jude's constant adherence to double standards in their conversation and you get what is to be expected: permanent anxiety, defense mechanisms that pay no heed to the laws of man, and a final breakdown that cannot be understood by any who are accustomed to seeing themselves in the annals of history and the halls of excellence. Hardy portrayed enough for conjecture's sake, but he was not interested in the reality of the situation beyond what it offered for dramatic effect. Sue was two steps away from being a madwoman in the attic, and her Wide Sargasso Sea was not Hardy's to tell.
Don't abandon me to them, Sue, to save your own soul only!I will admit to searching here for a variation on the theme of [b:Stoner|7845278|Stoner|John Williams|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348819923s/7845278.jpg|1559207]; not out of hope of finding another favorite, for my tastes have changed enough in the last year and a half that a second reading of Williams would result in a less enamored me, but of critiquing a familiarity. Both works focus on a single white male (academic) soul playing on a backdrop of father figures, love interests, and progeny, but only one pays a serious measure of attention to these background souls beyond the strengths they offer as emotive filler. In addition, when Stoner indulges in philosophical contemplation, it does not parody itself, nor does it lazily balance with Madonna/Whore complexes and extraneous prophesies more fit for penny dreadfuls than calamitous relationships. A certain type may find refuge in Jude, as it seems many have done; but not all are of that type.
I still have Far from the Madding Crowd on hand. It shall be saved for a few decades farther into the future, when I will be able to view it from a different generational perspective.