chris Gusta
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 138 |
| correct: | 96 (69.6%) |
| skipped: | 137 |
| best streak: | 9 |
| questions added: | 0 |
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]>
I don't think that this novel was terribly different from a lot of stories that I have read or seen in film about married America in the 50's, just prior to a large shift in the way people thought about themselves and their relationships, but this book is beautifully and powerfully written. The humor in it is harsh, the serious and depressing passages are dead on.It is one of the few books I've read recently where the ending didn't disappoint me.
The middle section of the novel, too, is different than many such stories. The characters see the chance they have for change and happiness and have it well within reach, and then just abandon that chance for something that is accidental and safe. This is the saddest part of the book. If the characters were always as miserable as they were in the first hundred pages or so, one wouldn't feel so bad for them when the later events make them miserable once again. But that brief hope for change makes the whole thing sort of crushing. ]]>
This book has, as usual for Conrad, a very interesting plot, with fairly interesting characters, with a good deal of strange racist dialect involved in describing them. The Chinese cook, through a large part of the novel, gets described as "the chink" and repeatedly has his "slanted eyes" referred to as a defining point of his personality, despite the fact that he is central to the plot and one of the most interesting of the people we come across in the story. Also, Pedro, the crocodile hunter is described as a hulking beast who is barely a man, having been picked up in the wilds of Central America. Where did Conrad get these perceptions of people of non-European descent?
The last twenty pages of the novel are fairly tense and unpredictable. I really could not figure out where the story was going to wind up until it got there. That is one of Conrad's strengths, though the thing I usually expect from him- central themes that come as completely foreign ideas that are wormed into the plot so unexpectedly that they kind of slap you in the face- doesn't come out here as strongly. The theme is actually fairly oblique here. This is more of an adventure story, and if I haven't gotten more than that out of it, it is also beautifully written in a way that I think most other writers will never be able to do. ]]>
bookshelves: to-read
]]>
bookshelves: to-read
]]>
An entertaining sci-fi novel in the political/quest mode, it is. However, I may have expected too much from this book after reading Delany's more experimantal novels, which I found far more overall interesting. Some of the ugliness of the characters and motivations found here-in were similar to much of what I liked about Dhalgren, but the plot was far more mundane. ]]>
bookshelves: to-read
]]>