Marrit Cnossen Cnossen itibaren Skelwith, Cumbria, İngiltere
Şimdiye kadar okuduğum en iyi on listemde.
Haha. LKH artık denemiyor, değil mi? En azından arsa ile bir hikaye yazıyor gibi davranmıyor - bu kitap düz porno. Demek istediğim, serinin tüm öncülüğü, "Merry en kısa sürede hamile kalmalı ve onunla birlikte yaşayan sıcak adamlardan oluşan bir harem var, bu yüzden mümkün olduğunca fazla seks yapmaları gerekiyor." Ve sonra LKH başka bir nedenden hemen hemen her bölümde seks yapmak için fırlatır. En azından komplo falan olduğunu iddia etmeye çalışmıyor.
... i didn't know this was out! (Thanks goodreads!) indeed, i have to be in the THIRD set! Is there ever a "third set"? Hmmm--maybe a new anthology: "the after hours set: sitting in at a jam session" (I'm trademarking that one!)
George Costanza excepted, I know less about women than anyone in the world, but I’d imagine that even liberated, post-feminist women could relate to the three feisty chicks at the centre of Can You Forgive Her? Pushed willy-nilly onto the marriage market, these wealthy Victorian ladies are faced with that eternal dilemma: how come all the hot, interesting guys are total dicks, and all the nice, bankable ones are kind of…blah? I’m vulgarizing shamelessly, but in fact each of these characters has to choose between a sexy bad-boy type and a dependable doofus. More to the point, maybe: each has to work out for herself a solution to another familiar dilemma, summed up by the novel’s heroine: ‘What should a woman do with her life?’ Trollope, needless to say, was no feminist. He tried hard to disguise himself as a typical Victorian gentleman, and his official views on the ‘woman question’ are an unappealing mishmash of genial male chauvinism and courtly condescension. But here’s the thing: Trollope was so far from being a misogynist that, on some fundamental level, he completely got women, sympathizing with them in ways he never did with men. That may be why, in Can You Forgive Her? , it’s the female characters who are fully developed moral agents, and the men who are stock figures out of Victorian central casting. (In this respect, Trollope is the inverse of Dickens, whose women are all Protestant Madonnas full of mercy and tears; personally, the only one I could believe for a second was Esther Summerson, and that’s because she was human enough to get smallpox). But apart from this rough-and-ready philogyny, what knocks me out about Trollope is his wisdom, which breathes through his books with something of the same quasi-divine calm that you sense in Tolstoy (who was a big fan of Trollope’s, by the way). Whatever they were like as individuals – and I know Tolstoy, at least, could be a prize idiot at times – as novelists, their default mode is wry omniscience. Both have the rare and generous capacity to honour a character’s singularity, to stay true to it even when their own moral or philosophical principles are all engaged on the opposite side. Lady Glencora, one of Trollope’s most fascinating creations, is a good example of this. In Can You Forgive Her?, he shows her seriously contemplating adultery, a crime for which the Victorians had a special horror. We see her lusting after a beautiful cad who - she is well aware - would probably end up gambling away her fortune and tossing her aside. She openly admits that she’d rather be beaten by such a man than endure a respectable life with her perfectly decent husband. All this is, of course, very, very bad. Trollope feels it to be bad. He disapproves. And yet he loves Glencora more than a little; he understands her right down to her smallest whim – and he wants us to love and understand her, too. God, there’s just so much life here, clumps of the stuff. Who would have thought that an 800-page triple decker about the endlessly prolonged romantic vacillations of a frigid, upper-class maiden would be not only great fun, but moving and profound? I’m not overlooking its flaws, either, the most obvious being that it’s morbidly, spectacularly obese. I repeat: Eight. Hundred. Freaking. Pages. If this book were a person, it would be a blubbery shut-in lolling in its own feces, waiting for the work crew to knock down the wall and bring in the special Sea World harness. More damaging than the sheer bulk, however, is the generic inconsistency: you have the almost Jamesian melodrama of the twinned central plot, which is then parodically duplicated in scenes of provincial clownishness involving an amorous widow. To my mind, this last subplot owes something to the older, 18th century comic novelists, while a few of the disreputable urban characters seem to have strolled over from a Dickens novel for a cameo (they even come with Dickensian names like Grimes, Tombe and Pinkle). Yet by some mysterious insufflation, Trollope manages to keep this immense, wayward monster alive and (fitfully) kicking. For all my enthusiasm, I don’t know anyone I would recommend the book to unreservedly. I can see how even the most willing reader might be turned off by the novel’s flab and by the slight gaminess of the prose (which might grow on you, though, as it did on me). Then too, I think you need a certain amount of ‘life experience’ to really appreciate Trollope’s shrewdness. I first read him at twenty or so and decided he was nothing special. Now, like Twain with his old man, I’m amazed at how smart he’s gotten all of a sudden.
This book made me feel like a dirty voyeur and love every minute of it.