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cspeet's review against another edition
2.0
This book reminded me why I'm not a huge Henry James fan. While the situation, and its resolution is interesting. I find James' prose to be overly complicated and obtuse. I am sure others like it, but it's just not for me.
caomhghin's review against another edition
5.0
Yes, a tour de force, a fascinating six months in the mind of an unfascinating man. Indirection and misdirection play through a sometimes opaque language that can suddenly become pellucid. In some ways it is a tragic story of a man (Strether) who has a slowly evolving epiphany he only partly understands and a realisation that for most of his life he has been stifled. At the end all is clear yet he returns to stifling Woollet.
gohnar23's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Philosophically beautiful
adt's review against another edition
challenging
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
jhmccabe's review against another edition
4.0
Incredible how good this novel is given how little happens in it.
korrick's review against another edition
3.0
The tortuous wall — girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands — wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country.Henry James is the sort of figure whom you don’t willingly engage with unless you have something to prove. I first encountered him in horror story form for the purposes of assigned reading in sophomore year of high school, was deeply disappointed and perhaps even a little horrified (and not in a spine tinglingly pleasing sense of the word), and forewent/near forsook him ever since until this time when I thought, well. I had succeeded with Proust, gone toe to toe with near two and a half thousand pages of Arabian Nights, and gotten through three of the four Great Chinese Classics: I think I could handle 500 pages of yet another white boy that aspired towards difficulty and ended up landing amongst egocentricity. This particular piece that I landed on for whatever reason holds an unusual relationship in the author’s bibliography, being his personal favorite but resonating not so much with his customary fan base, so it seemed as good a way as any to get a more legitimate sense of James’ authorial priorities rather than simply relying on average rating combined with reading count. Reading proved both more arduous yet less intensive than I had imagined, and I found myself wondering about figures who treated the inculcated habitus as human reality and couldn’t confront sex, gender, and all that jazz without fifty pages of metaphor and another ten or so of sidelong, blink and you miss it inconsistencies. Still, I found myself awfully fond at parts, and the potential for queer sensuality would have been unlimited had James taken the small extra step, so that and a few choice sections is where the third star is coming from. It's not enough to convince me to commit to the half baker's dozen or so of the James canon that certain lauded reading lists are laden down by, but neither was it sufficient to close the door on the author entirely.
He was young too then, the gentleman up there — he was very young; young enough apparently to be amused at any elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly watcher would do on finding himself watched.Europe vs the USA. Old money vs new. Colonialism vs slavery. It's something that many can talk about without ever naming it for what it is, and James certainly does that in spades with his man-trades-future-stepson-for-potential-wife, where the puritan emboldened by manufacturing wealth views the femme du monde uplifted by landed blood with utmost hatred as men, their ultimate source for both social standing and legal representation, flit between the two in dilettantism and in greed. All that would have been nigh unbearable had the various introductions not spilled their guts so early on, but it also helped that, while James himself is far too wriggling to nail down to a singularly pointed phrase that can be encompassed in less than 50 words, the true love affair he details is not one that involves a single woman, however good her breeding or unquestionable her conduct. From a scene where the main character covertly appraises a young man across the street in a manner that in any sort of cishet scenario would be immediately termed 'flirtation' to a moment where the same main character thinks he can understand how women en masse would be attracted to specific man (if not so many shortened words), there are certainly lines being drawn and dances being performed, but if you had to choose between one enacted between two adult and overtly consenting parties and one where at least one partner rode the line between manic pixie dream girl and shadowy harridan, you tell me which is the more credible romance. Of course such dreamings aren't confirmed in any concrete reality, but it tied the story together better for me than anything else would, so I'll keep it for what it means to me and meander on innocuously otherwise.
'Well,' said little Bilham, 'you're not a person to whom it's easy to tell things you don't want to know.[']I'm still having a hell of a time wrapping my reading life around my full time work life, so apologies if this review comes off as rather clipped. In any case, despite my middling rating and my less than impressed comments, there's still something to this whole style of writing that makes me think I'll have to try my hand at least one more before I make or break with the rest of it. I'm not even going to bother committing to any one James work at the moment, but he's hardly a rare figure at book sales, and if I come across something that fits the moment and my mood, well. It's a matter of recognizing when direct to the point serves best and when turnabout upon turnabout upon turnabout really does reflect a closer mirror to one's interiority, and while James could be infuriatingly dull sometimes in terms of what he thought it was worth saying twenty different ways, his sensuality when he let it run loose was borderline unmatched. It's worth exploring on at least one future occasion, and perhaps even the infamous "The Turn of the Screw" will get a second chance in my far more aged book. Until then, I leave whoever reads this with some description of the more tedious realities and a less than well argued promise of something beyond the heterosexual pale. Whether you consider that worth trudging 500+ pages for is for you to decide.
Had I, meanwhile, made him at once hero and historian, endowed him with the romantic privilege of the 'first person' — the darkest abyss of romance this, inveterately, when enjoyed on the grand scale — variety, and many other queer matters as well, might have been smuggled in by a back door.
-H. James, Preface to the New York Edition
sonofisaac's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
A book about discovering how deeply you can feel after your talent has lain dormant because of the wrong people or wrong town or wrong job. And yet James refuses to let his novel end with a typical ending, a wedding. Knowing that James was suspicious of such resolutions and emotions explains a lot and allows him to translate his experience into Strether.
thiskvanm's review against another edition
4.0
Someone please tell me how the Newsome family made its fortune, as we never do find out.
lee_foust's review against another edition
5.0
The word I keep thinking of in regards to this novel is charming. Seems a bit odd to think of James this way, but this narrative is so amazingly tender, thoughtful--yes, slow, slow as paint drying, sublimely, beautifully slow--that it charmed me all the way through. I think it's James's masterpiece and I guess my favorite of his novels. I, too, have been charmed by Europe so I suppose I was bound to love this one the most.