Nicola answers “hey guys! I am not a native, but I'm not...”

Ha Med asked this question about Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1):

hey guys! I am not a native, but I'm not new to novels....... I cant quite understand the text in this book, Am I the only one??? should I read another book prior to this one in ortherto understand??? (the literary books I had read and came across with no problem at all: pride and prejudice, Frankenstein etc,,, ) thanks in advance

Nicola I've just finished it and it's not a straight forward, relatively easy read like P&P and Frankenstein are. There is a lot of moving around in time, th…moreI've just finished it and it's not a straight forward, relatively easy read like P&P and Frankenstein are. There is a lot of moving around in time, things which are hinted at over and over and sometimes are never fully explained, leaving the reader to guess at what happened. At other times the characters can seem to speak in riddles (especially Beloved).

I would think you'd have to have quite a good grasp of both English and Literary skills to really follow what is going on a lot of the time.

P.S. Older books (like the two you mentioned) are often much easier to follow for readers who don't speak English as a first language (unless you are reading a translation of course!). They are all (at least all of the ones I've read have been) plain, straight forward books. They don't jump around a lot in time, they don't have unusual or 'innovative' sentence/book structure and there is no magical realism or similar. Occasionally they have words which you don't really hear in modern speech anymore but the words would all be able to be looked up in a dictionary to work out their meaning so that shouldn't be a problem.(less)

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