Orgoglio e pregiudizio in Reading Challenges

Nov 14, 2012 Goldberg rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I don't know how this book came to be so overrated,
Jane Austen is a dwarf considering great authors as Dostoyevsky,Orwell,Huxley, Calvino,Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol and pretty much every other authors I can remind in this second,
so Why ? Why this book is listed among the greatest novels is really a mistery to me.

Some quotes:

"The first impression I had of Pride and Prejudice was that Jane Austen was writing a comedic tale poking fun at the social etiquette and expectations of her time, specifically I don't know how this book came to be so overrated,
Jane Austen is a dwarf considering great authors as Dostoyevsky,Orwell,Huxley, Calvino,Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol and pretty much every other authors I can remind in this second,
so Why ? Why this book is listed among the greatest novels is really a mistery to me.

Some quotes:

"The first impression I had of Pride and Prejudice was that Jane Austen was writing a comedic tale poking fun at the social etiquette and expectations of her time, specifically challenging the idea that marriage is an institution devoid of love but focused on financial and societal improvement. By the end of the story, however, love was used as an excuse to enter into a marriage which provides financial and social improvement, and social etiquette and expectations are presented as a means to ensure the stability and respect of ones family. Elizabeth is initially presented as a strong-willed woman caught between love and money. This “conflict,” however, ends up a strawman—set up only to create a means to provide her with both love _and_ money, while eliminating her wit in favor for romance. Darcy is presented as a brooding aristocrat with little to be desired beyond his money. Yet the initial impression ends up completely reversed, with minimal to no explanation. He becomes the perfect prospective husband, and allows for a socially acceptable and conveniently romantic marriage by the end of the story."

"This book has been billed as one of the greatest love stories in all of literature. I have no idea why. When the story begins, Elizabeth Bennett is smart, independent, and not overly concerned with bagging a husband, which, by the standards of Victorian England, makes her a feminist trailblazer. Then she meets Mr. Darcy, who acts like an insufferable prick (this in a society obsessed with grace and good manners), and Elizabeth has the good sense to identify Mr. Darcy as the insufferable prick he is. And so she spends the first part of the book rightly loathing this asshole. Fast forward: by chance, Elizabeth finds herself touring Darcy's palatial estate, meeting his hundreds of servants, using his solid gold bidet, and suddenly she starts thinking that maybe Mr. Darcy isn't such an asshole after all. The moral of the story seems to be that enough money can make even the most abrasive and obnoxious jerk seem like prince charming. And what's really frustrating is when you realize that it's 200 years later, and while the world has changed immensely, the people are still the same. Go society! So if you want to read a real love story, read Anna Karenina. If you want to read the biggest piece of anti-feminist drivel in the literary canon, then by all means, read Pride and Prejudice."

"I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Mark Twain "

"Scarcely is there a chapter when anyone in the scene is preoccupied by anything other than the marital hunt. They are never engaged in their jobs, or travel, or diseases, or law, or wars, or tragedies, or victories, or sudden good fortunes. When those things come up it merely shuffles the marital deck; a girl getting a fever is an excuse to stick around an eligible bachelor’s house a while longer."

"Don’t tell me that storytelling wasn’t more complex back then. Austen was writing more than two hundred years after the deaths of Marlowe and Shakespeare, and fifty years after Jonathan Swift’s profane poems about Celia and Alexander Pope pilloried this entire uptight system in The Rape of the Lock. And don’t you dare tell me she wrote this way because she was a woman. It’s incomprehensible that the sex of Mary Anne Evans and Anne Bradstreet only had the imagination or desire to conjure this. The English language canon disproves such misogyny. While I’ve yet to peruse the Brontes, their opinions of Austen lead me to further believe she wasn’t the benchmark of female internal life in her culture.

Perhaps it’s simply not in my cognitive make-up to appreciate these things, but Pride and Prejudice is insufferably about the pursuits of the privileged. Primarily, this novel is about Elizabeth Bennet struggling between two factors: finding and pursuing love, and finding and pursuing economic stability. In both cases the mechanism of drama is Jane Austen throwing men into her path, and Elizabeth picking which one makes her the happiest or unhappiest, and which one has the most money. This path is so narrow that it begs for dynamic characters, but barring Mr. Collins sounding particularly buffoonish, these guys all sound like the same exposition-boards and philosophy text books. And while I can recognize that Austen wrote characters to sound like the ideal of prim conversation at the time, it reads to me as insufferable. When I think about Things Fall Apart, and Mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the argument that Elizabeth’s conflict has any great merit is silly. This is a rich girl whose dueling motives are either “Stay Rich” or “Be In Love,” and she doesn’t work terribly hard for either. Even the last fifty pages of the novel are her talking a prospect, which she’s already decided on, to exhaustion. There is no effort. There is only chatter."
...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Anna rated it really liked it

Shelves: 54tasks

Semplicemente bello, bellissimo!! Libro scorrevole, divertente e scritto divinamente. E con una storia d'amore da rendere invidiosi tutti!!! Primo Romanzo della Austen azzeccatissimo, sono pronta a leggerne altri!!!! ...more

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Sep 28, 2012 Antonella rated it really liked it · review of another edition

bello! bello! bello! Leggerlo la prima volta
in inglese non è stato per nulla facile, però
ne è valsa la pena. Credo che in lingua
originale renda molto di più che in
traduzione. Comunque successivamente l'ho
riletto in italiano, così, tanto per essere
sicura di aver ben interpretato il senso! è
uno di quei libri che restano sempre attuali e
che, almeno una volta nella vita, va letto! =) ...more

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Nov 04, 2012 Mimonni rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: bookcrossing, 2010

Romanzo/favola molto divertente con personaggi al limite della “macchietta” e ambientazione ultra perbenista.
In fin di conti questo romanzo narra di una delle più comuni illusioni di cui sia vittima almeno una volta gran parte del genere femminile: lui è così, ma forse ha uno stupendo lato nascosto, se comunque non dovesse averlo stai a vedere che per me cambierà (e può darsi che sia proprio io a dargli una spinta in tal senso…).
Ma come ho detto questa è una favola 😉

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Aug 23, 2013 Sbri rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classici, eroine, scaffale-traboccante

Lettura veloce, storia tanto puccia, siamo tutte innamorate di Darcy.
Mary Bennet è probabilmente il personaggio più malcagato del libro, eppure ne meriterebbe uno a parte.
Tutto quello che ho da dire è già stato detto, ottimo libro per chiudere i battenti col presente e calarsi nell'aristocrazia vittoriana. ...more

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