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A review by nekerri
Silas Marner by George Eliot
4.0
Hmmmm….liked this book…..a story about an innocent man, Silas Marner, wronged by his best friend, turned away by his betrothed and suspended from church membership. With a broken heart and a disillusioned view of the world, he begins a solitary life in the new country of Raveloe. For fifteen years, he lives alone, sitting at his loom 16 hours a day, weaving linen for the towns people and counting his gold. The towns people, not knowing where he came from, or who his people are, view him with distrust and suspicion. Another devasting blow in his faith of humanity is dealt to him when his gold is stolen. Such begins a turn of events where those people wronged are vindicated and those who have sinned get their just due.
George Eliot has a fantastic grasp on human nature, and as in Middlemarch, she does an excellent job of developing meaningful characters and strengthening their personalities through anecdotes which display various human weaknesses and strengths.
Also like Middlemarch, Silas Marner is loaded with longer than long sentences which often have words that contradict each other. Many times I found myself reading the same sentence three times and having to cancel out certain words just to get the meaning. Although her sidebars of human nature descriptions were long winded, and sometimes tedious to read, they were almost always enlightening, and I found myself turning page corners to mark pages quite often.
All that being said, the storyline was good, the characters quite fleshed out, the overall message presented very well, but the long sentences (and words) made this book a little less enjoyable to me than I think it would have been without them. It's kind of a catch-22 because her insights are fabulous and truly insightful, but sometimes so painful to read that by the time you figure them out, the emotion of the insight is lost or doesn't have quite as big an impact as it should. Anyway…..I gave it 4 stars, but it is really more like 3.5-3.75 stars in my world.
George Eliot has a fantastic grasp on human nature, and as in Middlemarch, she does an excellent job of developing meaningful characters and strengthening their personalities through anecdotes which display various human weaknesses and strengths.
Also like Middlemarch, Silas Marner is loaded with longer than long sentences which often have words that contradict each other. Many times I found myself reading the same sentence three times and having to cancel out certain words just to get the meaning. Although her sidebars of human nature descriptions were long winded, and sometimes tedious to read, they were almost always enlightening, and I found myself turning page corners to mark pages quite often.
All that being said, the storyline was good, the characters quite fleshed out, the overall message presented very well, but the long sentences (and words) made this book a little less enjoyable to me than I think it would have been without them. It's kind of a catch-22 because her insights are fabulous and truly insightful, but sometimes so painful to read that by the time you figure them out, the emotion of the insight is lost or doesn't have quite as big an impact as it should. Anyway…..I gave it 4 stars, but it is really more like 3.5-3.75 stars in my world.