Challenge (buddy-read)

[Mela]

Who wants to read Challenge by Vita Sackville-West? This is our buddy-read in November 2024.

If you have read it already, or you are reading it at another (later) time - write here what you think about the book too.

[Please keep in mind to hide spoilers in spoiler brackets.]

[Daniela]

I will read it!

[Mela]

I hope to read it too. For now, I can't find a copy. I counted for archive.org but one can't borrow there still.

[Mela]

I just couldn't get into the story. Perhaps, I will try the book again, when I read some other books by the author (for now, it was my first).

[Daniela]

So far, fifty pages, I am finding Herakleion internal and diplomatic affairs rather boring. I know Vita Sackville-West's biography and about her involvement with Violet Trefusis (I also read Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson and Harold Nicolson by Norman Rose) and I have read that this book is about their love story concealed as a heterosexual love story, so perhaps I was expecting something a little different. If this first pages are an introduction to the love story, it seems that it is too long. Perhaps I will change my mind reading on.

[Daniela]

I didn't manage to finish it by the end of the month but I will finish it in the next few days. Unfortunately the theme that didn't grab me much, the diplomatic and political life of the island, continues to constitute the majority of the plot.
(view spoiler)[ Is nowhere in the book addressed the problem that the great love story is between two first cousins? Is it considered normal? (hide spoiler)]
Is someone else reading it?

[Daniela]

I finished it today and I must say that I didn't appreciate this book very much. Perhaps, as I have already said, it is because the love affair, which I thought was the most important part of the book, is very marginal and the setting and the political and diplomatic history of the Greek island take over everything else in the plot. I found everything rather boring: the setting, the series of diplomats who are the main group of characters, the two main characters, the story of the rebellion of island of Aphros. I also don't understand how this novel could cause a scandal in the twenties.

[Mela]

Daniela wrote: "I finished it today and I must say that I didn't appreciate this book very much. Perhaps, as I have already said, it is because the love affair, which I thought was the most important part of the b..."

At least you went through it, I gave up.

[Sonia]

I have read two books by Vita Sackville-West All Passion Spent and The Edwardians. I enjoyed both. All Passion Spent grew on me after I had finished reading it and thought about it, whereas The Edwardians was enjoyable as I read it.
The Edwardian period while short is interesting in showing the transition between Victorian Britain and WW1.