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A review by ptactwo
Potop by Henryk Sienkiewicz
3.25
Idk. On the other hand for sure an engaging read, like, it is a good quality adventure novel (something actually harder to come by than one could expect). On the other, psychological construction of characters is, like. Bad. To put it mildly.
It was fun to read about friendships, even decades long ones, that still retain very clear status distinction between friends. I think contemporary world doesn't do that. Friends are your equals.
Deeply unsexy. Both in the sense of actual eroticism (and you have torture scenes! tension between characters in love! consensual and nonconsensual relations are an important topic there!) and in the vague sense of being sexy that I'm not gonna try and define rn.
Didacticism, didacticism, okay, to be expected, whatever, I don't care. Fun to think about how much we can trust the narrator - small glimpses that tell you it isn't actually a simple didacticism, esp. in that sequence when Kmicic goes to raid, murder and pillage Prussian villages and prays to Mary while people around him scream for mercy. Probably Sienkiewicz might be hiding more than he lets on. I think I have somewhere saved some book analysing his writing, I should look into it at some point.
It was fun to read about friendships, even decades long ones, that still retain very clear status distinction between friends. I think contemporary world doesn't do that. Friends are your equals.
Deeply unsexy. Both in the sense of actual eroticism (and you have torture scenes! tension between characters in love! consensual and nonconsensual relations are an important topic there!) and in the vague sense of being sexy that I'm not gonna try and define rn.
Didacticism, didacticism, okay, to be expected, whatever, I don't care. Fun to think about how much we can trust the narrator - small glimpses that tell you it isn't actually a simple didacticism, esp. in that sequence when Kmicic goes to raid, murder and pillage Prussian villages and prays to Mary while people around him scream for mercy. Probably Sienkiewicz might be hiding more than he lets on. I think I have somewhere saved some book analysing his writing, I should look into it at some point.