Phil's review
Middlemarch (Signet Classics)
by George Eliot
I like your recommendation--"The jackanapes and mongrels who need to learn that people aren't so bad as they seem."
The book blew me away, but I remember thinking, it's too bad I don't find any of the characters really very likeable. But of course you've hit upon it--that's just it: in any other drawing room drama, they might each have been the villain, but Eliot gets into the mind and the humanity of each so well, that instead I am inclined to think I am supposed to like each and every one as the hero, and I am slightly miffed when I don't. They are neither hero nor villain; they are people who in real life you would DISlike and never try to know, but Eliot does make us know them, and they become human, sympathetic, and very real.
I was in awe of this book when I read it, but I hadn't quite thought of it in just that particular way until I read your recommendation tag. Thanks.
Phil's review
Middlemarch (Signet Classics) by George Eliot
Phil's review
rating:
recommended for: The jackanapes and mongrels who need to learn that people aren't so bad as they seem.
When I finished reading this book, I wrote in the front of it that 'This is the most rewarding book you will ever read' and left it on a bookshelf in Fiji, dreaming that someone would go through the effort of reading the whole thing based only on my comment. I doubt anyone's picked it up since then; Fiji is a strange and frightening place.
I spake the truth, though. It strikes me that most of those who've read Middlemarch these days are hapless souls who resent it as the mammoth task some crooked professor set them at university. I read it for myself, unwittingly, and was pleasantly surprised. George Eliot conjures a massive spectrum of characters, and gets into the head of every major player in the novel. We are shown what motivates the most despicable figures as well as those we are drawn to, and as a result there is no one in this book who you cannot relate to in some way or another, or at the very least understand. In my opinion that is what makes it such a grand read: George El...more
I spake the truth, though. It strikes me that most of those who've read Middlemarch these days are hapless souls who resent it as the mammoth task some crooked professor set them at university. I read it for myself, unwittingly, and was pleasantly surprised. George Eliot conjures a massive spectrum of characters, and gets into the head of every major player in the novel. We are shown what motivates the most despicable figures as well as those we are drawn to, and as a result there is no one in this book who you cannot relate to in some way or another, or at the very least understand. In my opinion that is what makes it such a grand read: George El...more
I like your recommendation--"The jackanapes and mongrels who need to learn that people aren't so bad as they seem."
The book blew me away, but I remember thinking, it's too bad I don't find any of the characters really very likeable. But of course you've hit upon it--that's just it: in any other drawing room drama, they might each have been the villain, but Eliot gets into the mind and the humanity of each so well, that instead I am inclined to think I am supposed to like each and every one as the hero, and I am slightly miffed when I don't. They are neither hero nor villain; they are people who in real life you would DISlike and never try to know, but Eliot does make us know them, and they become human, sympathetic, and very real.
I was in awe of this book when I read it, but I hadn't quite thought of it in just that particular way until I read your recommendation tag. Thanks.