Bleak House in On Paths Unknown

Aug 03, 2021 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, fiction, english-19th-c, listened-as-audiobook, favorites, novels

I absolutely loved this book, I mean, how could you not love a book that reduces politics to Boodle vs Noodle and kills off a minor character via spontaneous combustion? Besides that, there is a scalding satire of the legal profession, several badly kept secrets bubbling into murderous tension, and a panoply of lovable and despicable minor characters, each with their own manner of speaking and acting. Dickens would have been a fabulous filmmaker as his camera’s eye is always peeking behind doors ...more

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Jun 13, 2018 Zorlon Zorlon rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"Unreason and injustice at the top, unreason and injustice at the heart and at the bottom, unreason and injustice from beginning to end--if it ever has an end..."

Easily Dickens' best book and one in which most should find something or someone to love and loathe. It is a high work of mystery, love, and litigation, a combination that might send one running to a carrot peeler to run over one's genitals but which Dickens, one of the grandmasters of world literature, makes simply wonderful, funny, an "Unreason and injustice at the top, unreason and injustice at the heart and at the bottom, unreason and injustice from beginning to end--if it ever has an end..."

Easily Dickens' best book and one in which most should find something or someone to love and loathe. It is a high work of mystery, love, and litigation, a combination that might send one running to a carrot peeler to run over one's genitals but which Dickens, one of the grandmasters of world literature, makes simply wonderful, funny, and sad all at once.
It's rare I read a book where I get mad--very, very upset at suddenlies but Dickens managed it here (I won't ruin it, of course) and kudos to him!
The plot is complex and best left unearthed as one goes along, but I can sum it up thus: a decades-long legal case has estranged various, far-flung surviving members of the Jarndyce family. The case at Chancery, where hollow, lovecraftian lawmen masturbate litigiously and religiously all over the case, now a running joke, is the core of the book, but this is a perfect example of Dickens' craft with characters since it is who he populates the novel with, not what, that matters most here. And there are great characters! Esther Summerson, the secret heart of the book, the often-narrator, who is good and kind and bemused by the idiocy around her; Lady Dedlock, keeper of a dark secret; numerous others with pieces of the secret; Mr. Bucket, literature's first detective (who must have been the inspiration for Dosteovsky's Porfiry Petrovich); various villains, of whom Harold Skimpole stands out because he's actually not a villain, but is the worst person in the novel: Dickens has worked a minor miracle making a semi-heroic character who you want to kick in the teeth repeatedly. There are so many others, the causehead Mrs Jellyby and her long-suffering teenaged daughter, Mr Guppy, the main villain Tulkinghorn--I can't say enough.
Dickens had perfected his style by this point, perfectly balancing farce, lyricism, pathos, humor, and terror. He also stuns the reader with occasional bait-and-toss, which is refreshing, given the current state of utterly predictable narratives that are wildly uninteresting. A shame no one writes like this anymore. ...more

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