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elerireads 's review for:
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
This was so long and so many different things happened that it's probably impossible to write a comprehensive review. I can see how it would be an absolute goldmine / bottomless pit for an English student. There were bits I thought were brilliant and there were also bits which bored me to death. Sprawling across so many characters and such a long time frame, it was a little bit like Middlemarch, except it was soooo cynical! The gloomy portrayal of human nature (vanity vanity vanity) was good fun but also very frustrating when all the characters were so flawed. I almost felt like the "a novel without a hero" description was a challenge for the reader to find a hero in it after all, so I got quite grumpy when I kept being thwarted in my attempts to make one of the characters into one. I enjoyed the little sardonic quips and condescending preachiness of the narrator, and the way it was sometimes made out that he(?) was also a character in the story when the rest of the time it was straightforward 3rd person omniscient POV.