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A review by ejrathke
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
5.0
Originally titled The Saddest Story until Ford's editor apparently informed him that would make the book unsellable. Of course, this novel's not exactly new or anything like that--published in 1915--but it's very new to me, having only even heard of him for the first time when I saw the book in Dublin a little over a week before I began reading it. I went home, internetted him, then returned the next day to buy it, and read most of it on the plane home.
The original title's quite fitting. It's truly one of the saddest stories I've ever read, but not in a tragic sense because there are no upswings of fortune, just the dissolution of a marriage that takes their whole life and happens mostly in secret to our narrator, who relates the tale nonlinearly, in the manner of recollection: impressionistic. It's one of the greatest books I've read in recent weeks and it only took me almost a century to find it, but maybe the rest of my life to ingest it.
The original title's quite fitting. It's truly one of the saddest stories I've ever read, but not in a tragic sense because there are no upswings of fortune, just the dissolution of a marriage that takes their whole life and happens mostly in secret to our narrator, who relates the tale nonlinearly, in the manner of recollection: impressionistic. It's one of the greatest books I've read in recent weeks and it only took me almost a century to find it, but maybe the rest of my life to ingest it.