Ben's review
Dombey and Son (Modern Library Classics)
by Charles Dickens
Ben's review
Dombey and Son (Modern Library Classics) by Charles Dickens
Ben's review
rating:
recommended for: readers of Dickens
I thought different things about this book over the course of my reading it. Natural enough, given the length. But, as Herodotus teaches us, don't judge a life happy or tragic -- or a book good or bad -- until you've seen it to the end.
Dombey & Son is not as successful a novel as some of Dickens' finest: David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend (currently, my absolute favorite), Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, etc. Judging it purely on structure and the usual things we read novels for, Dombey is a little bit dogmatic (preachy, really), a little bit full of loose strings and promised arcs that never quite come to fruition.
But what comes to you, as you read its 700 or so pages, is that it is devoted, beautifully -- and you'll have to excuse me here -- to a True Thing. The books is a maybe not so much a story as a narrative that centers around a single theme of first importance to to any human heart -- the relationship between a parent and a child. This theme is explored in...more
Dombey & Son is not as successful a novel as some of Dickens' finest: David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend (currently, my absolute favorite), Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, etc. Judging it purely on structure and the usual things we read novels for, Dombey is a little bit dogmatic (preachy, really), a little bit full of loose strings and promised arcs that never quite come to fruition.
But what comes to you, as you read its 700 or so pages, is that it is devoted, beautifully -- and you'll have to excuse me here -- to a True Thing. The books is a maybe not so much a story as a narrative that centers around a single theme of first importance to to any human heart -- the relationship between a parent and a child. This theme is explored in...more
