The Stone Diaries in Around the World in 80 Books

Sep 10, 2014 Bogdan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: new-world

After reading this novel, I have an indefinite feeling, as I did not managed to spell out clearly the essence. The life of Daisy Goodwill that constitutes the center of this novel in the format of the 19th century autobiographies, is not extraordinary in any way. You can feel her efforts to be a happy person, but ultimately, she fails to be content with her life and despite having a large family and close friends, loneliness is the best characterization of her life.

It is a novel that apparently After reading this novel, I have an indefinite feeling, as I did not managed to spell out clearly the essence. The life of Daisy Goodwill that constitutes the center of this novel in the format of the 19th century autobiographies, is not extraordinary in any way. You can feel her efforts to be a happy person, but ultimately, she fails to be content with her life and despite having a large family and close friends, loneliness is the best characterization of her life.

It is a novel that apparently has no plot. In fact, it has a strong conflict, the struggle I mentioned in the above paragraph. This makes up also the premise: Daisy is a typical women of 20th century struggling to find a life direction. Her loneliness is ruining her mind as well as she is affected by depression. I am sure I did not exhausted the entire meaning of this complex novel and this ensures that reading it later will still be a good investment of my time. A great and complex message, pertaining to the life in general of many people, thus my rating is 5 for premise.

Regarding the form, the most striking element is the chapters that are like snapshots in several times of the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett. They are adapted from the autobiographical books of the 19th century. But the similarities are just on the surface. The language and novel message is totally different. I kind of disagree with the author choice of adding up few words about the novel in a introduction note, as it spoils the authenticity impression of a real autobiography. Also the shifting narrative voices, despite not striking out too much, were not on my taste. I will thus rate it with a 3 for form.

In terms of originality, as far as I can tell, the novel is fairly original. There are also other authors and books writing more or less on the same topic, but the approach from Carol is one of the most original one. So I will give it a 4 for the level of originality.

The characters are one of the focus points of this novel and they are mostly well individualized. Of course that the main characters and Daisy are very well described and analyzed but even the side characters are better than the average. I'll thus rate it for this with 5.

Regarding the complexity and difficulty, the form chosen by the author made the task of writing it quite difficult. But also the book message(s) are not obvious and for me they appeared after reading and thinking it over the next day. Thus, I will rate it then with a 5 for complexity and difficulty.

In terms of credibility, as the autobiography is fictional, there are few things you can debate in terms of degree of credibility. Still, the accident of the first Daisy's husband seems odd and quite incredible. Therefor my rating for credibility is 4.

The last criteria is edition. This paperback edition has a quite elegant design with nice covers and good paper. But after few days the covers and first and last page started to unglue from the spine. This is something I don't like and adding up the few proofing errors, I will rate it with a 2.

To summarize, I really liked this novel especially due the fact that I did not exhausted the book messages. All in all, my final rating for this book is 4.00, which requires no rounding on Goodreads system.

+--------------------------+-----------------+
| Criteria | Rating |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Premise | 5 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Form | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Originality | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Characters | 5 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Difficulty/Complexity | 5 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Credibility | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Edition | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Total | 4.00 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+

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