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A review by thenovelbook
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
5.0
Re-read, November 2021: There’s so much to take in with this book, and even though I’ve read it 3 or 4 times now, every time it still feels like a fresh peeling back of the layers and trying to understand. It’s a bit more complex than what I can competently parse, but I do love it so.
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Original review:
The dialogue and prose in Gaudy Night is some of the richest I have ever read. It's very dense and it takes time to understand it, but that's what creates such a connection between me and this book. Hours after finishing the last page, phrases from it still roll around in my head to be savored.
This volume contains the resolution for a romantic relationship three books in the making, and, incidentally, one of the most thoughtful adult relationships I can recall in fiction. Much as I enjoy reading about the Mr. Darcys and Mr. Rochesters of the literary world, you can have them all and leave me Lord Peter Wimsey. He's the one with the real power of mind, heart, and words.
I have heard that Dorothy Sayers, having created her detective and slowly endowed him with great complexity, more or less fell in love with him, and created a match for him in "Harriet Vane," a stand-in for herself. It wouldn't surprise me at all. His blend of intelligence, compassion, wit, honesty, affectation, nervous energy, and control is unique, contradictory, and hardly imaginable in the real world, but very appealing.
I also love Harriet Vane a lot. Her honest analytical mind is only enhanced by her all-too-relatable emotions as she tries to work out whether it is possible to balance the demands of brain versus heart.
Favorite passage:
"I suppose one oughtn't to marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job."
"Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don't look on themselves as jobs but as fellow-creatures."
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Original review:
The dialogue and prose in Gaudy Night is some of the richest I have ever read. It's very dense and it takes time to understand it, but that's what creates such a connection between me and this book. Hours after finishing the last page, phrases from it still roll around in my head to be savored.
This volume contains the resolution for a romantic relationship three books in the making, and, incidentally, one of the most thoughtful adult relationships I can recall in fiction. Much as I enjoy reading about the Mr. Darcys and Mr. Rochesters of the literary world, you can have them all and leave me Lord Peter Wimsey. He's the one with the real power of mind, heart, and words.
I have heard that Dorothy Sayers, having created her detective and slowly endowed him with great complexity, more or less fell in love with him, and created a match for him in "Harriet Vane," a stand-in for herself. It wouldn't surprise me at all. His blend of intelligence, compassion, wit, honesty, affectation, nervous energy, and control is unique, contradictory, and hardly imaginable in the real world, but very appealing.
I also love Harriet Vane a lot. Her honest analytical mind is only enhanced by her all-too-relatable emotions as she tries to work out whether it is possible to balance the demands of brain versus heart.
Favorite passage:
"I suppose one oughtn't to marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job."
"Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don't look on themselves as jobs but as fellow-creatures."