A review by danilanglie
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

4.0

I listened to this as an audiobook which I think was probably not the smartest move, since it's a rich and complex text and it's harder to have true fidelity to a text when listening to it, at least for me. I end up missing more. But with that being said, I really did enjoy this. I thought it was laugh out loud funny while also being real and complicated and melancholy at various points.

Isabel is a character who defies simple categorization. She's... feisty and individualistic, very quintessentially American, but she's also insecure and unsure what she wants or who she is. She can be a very poor judge of character but also she's very firm with boundaries. Until abruptly, she very much is not.

Watching this character become subsumed by a terrible man, and then seeing how she struggles to reckon with where she's ended up, and then that ending, with all its juicy ambiguity and hope... I really enjoyed the experience. I think this is a novel I'll want to re-read in like five years, and I bet I'll get even more out of it.