Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by hayesall
Silas Marner by George Eliot
3.0
The first chapter had me convinced this was going to be a fantasy novel where a maligned weaver who mysteriously fades in and out of reality has to leave the world he knows to go off on an adventure. Hilariously, the penultimate chapter—when Silas returns with Eppie to Lantern Yard only to find the location of his former life has disappeared under the auspice of English industrialization—also convinced me this wanted to be a fantasy novel. But everything between these two chapters didn't quite fit.
Alexander Chee in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel recounted his writing process, and how he'd experienced cases where he stumbled into the story he wanted to tell after ninety pages, so he cut the first ninety and used the remaining forty-five as the actual beginning (the full story is in section 2 of the chapter "The Autobiography of My Novel," around page 219 of my edition). It felt like George Eliot wasn't sure what story she wanted to tell, found it about 100 pages in, and then had all of these extraneous plotlines to wrap up. This resulted in a lot of chapters about the landed gentry which I had no interest in, sixty-odd pages dedicated to the Eppie storyline, and a Wordsworth quote in the preface that did not seem relevant until the second half.
Regardless, I really liked how this was written, and Eliot's exploration of community, ostracization, use of dialect, and ability to wrap up disparate storylines each felt superb.
Alexander Chee in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel recounted his writing process, and how he'd experienced cases where he stumbled into the story he wanted to tell after ninety pages, so he cut the first ninety and used the remaining forty-five as the actual beginning (the full story is in section 2 of the chapter "The Autobiography of My Novel," around page 219 of my edition). It felt like George Eliot wasn't sure what story she wanted to tell, found it about 100 pages in, and then had all of these extraneous plotlines to wrap up. This resulted in a lot of chapters about the landed gentry which I had no interest in, sixty-odd pages dedicated to the Eppie storyline, and a Wordsworth quote in the preface that did not seem relevant until the second half.
Regardless, I really liked how this was written, and Eliot's exploration of community, ostracization, use of dialect, and ability to wrap up disparate storylines each felt superb.