My expectations have just changed. Sometimes I think about how I rate books, or more specifically the enjoyment I feel from books. I see that I rate most of what I read with three or four stars.
Or to put it another way, I enjoy most of the books I read. I worry that I'm just easily amused sometimes. I really enjoyed reading this summer's must-read thriller Gone Girl , I thought it was well-paced, and it kept me engaged throughout the book.
It didn't make me think about any of the big important questions of life, but I wasn't expecting it to. I read it to be entertained, and it succeeded. Was it a better book than George Saunders new collection of stories? Probably not, writing wise Saunders is probably better. The stories in Saunders collection were more what my personal liking were I'd wouldn't necessarily say a story about a missing wife is one of the things I go looking for in a story, on the other hand Saunders writes about the sorts of things I generally would think I'm looking for in a story.
My expectations were dashed by Saunders though, I wanted more than was in the book. I rated it accordingly, I know people who are going to like it a lot more than I did, and I feel kind of envious that they will have a better experience than I did. But that is going off topic a bit. I don't think I'm a good reviewer of 'popular fiction' the sorts of books that fall into my all-time favorites are generally not plot-driven.
They aren't the sort of books that have blurbs that say, "a real-page turner", or "call in sick tomorrow because you're going to be up all night reading to the final twist". Instead when I do read these books I usually have one of two reactions. My critical faculties usually drop when I read a book like this and unless the writing is awful I'm usually fairly entertained. It's sort of the same way that I watch movies these days. I see them so infrequently that I'm easily caught up in the whole 'spectacle' of them.
Blow some shit up and I'm kind of happy these days in the three or four times a year that I sit down and watch a movie. But am I really this easily amused? Or after about twenty years of being a fairly serious reader who took literature classes, worked in a library for a couple of years, interned for almost a year with a publisher and then worked for the past eleven years in one of the biggest fiction sections in the country I'm not trying to brag, I'm just trying to get the idea that I've spent a lot of time around books in the past two decades I've just gotten fairly good at picking out what books to read?
I wouldn't have picked out this book though. If it hadn't been for Roubaud I would haven't have read Trollope I was going to say ever, but that is stupid to say, who knows what would have happened, what I would have read that would have pointed me towards him, which is something you never really do know once you start reading, and especially when you happen to pick up a book by someone who really loves reading and gives you names and titles and pointers towards other writers you might have never thought of or heard of.
Some band I never heard of was thanked or mentioned as an influence, and sometimes that would lead to a new favorite or sometimes it would lead to a band I'd be mystified about why they were thought highly of, but it is one of the pre-internet ways that my musical repertoire grew. When I was twenty four I believed I had read all the novels that mattered.
I thought literature was dead. I figured there were maybe a few odds and ends of authors I'd already read that I should still read, but mostly I figured I'd seen it all. I was wrong. Should you read Trollope? I have no idea. I'm not going to try to sell him on you. If you want to be sold on him and you have the inclination to read Roubaud's labyrinthine prose then I'd recommend letting him sell you on it. I really enjoyed my week I spent with Trollope, and I'm planning on spending more time with him in the near future.
Is this the review you meant to write? Isn't this just another of your long-winded why I read reviews? I meant for this to be more involved with other topics.
I meant to do more propositions. I wrote those a couple of weeks ago, everything after them I wrote today. I wanted to write about love: conditional, unconditional, passion and pragmatic. I wanted to create a Roubaud-esque review where I swung the topics around, weaved in and out of them and maybe answered nothing but constructed something nevertheless. Then this was going to be the last review I ever wrote for this site or second to last depending on if I had written this before or after the one other review that I feel obliged to still write, which I haven't written yet.
It wasn't going to be stated that it was the last review, it wasn't going to be a grand fuck-you or anything. I just planned on not writing anymore, or if I did write reviews not send them to the feed, just let them be reminders to me of what I thought at particular times, sometimes about the book I just read and sometimes about other things. Instead I'll probably keep writing these things, which are more of a public diary than reviews anyway. One day maybe I'll figure out the answers to these questions and then I can get to the serious business of writing book reports.
View all 30 comments. Aug 30, Katie Lumsden rated it it was amazing. This was magnificent. I love Anthony Trollope's writing style, his explorations of marriage, love and responsibilities. Few people can make me love and hate characters like Trollope can, and this is another resounding success. What an author. View 2 comments. This is an excellent, if long, read. Trollope tells a good story and I think his female characters are stronger, better developed and more believeable than any other male Victorian novelist.
He is still conventional apart from the novel Marion Fay perhaps but he has a strong empathy with his female characters and they tend to be better drawn and have more depth than his male characters. The novel revolves around the romantic adventures of three women; Alice Vavasor, her cousin Kate and Lady Gl This is an excellent, if long, read. The novel revolves around the romantic adventures of three women; Alice Vavasor, her cousin Kate and Lady Glencora Palliser.
Alice has to chose between dull, reliable and loving in the form of John Grey and exciting, dangerous and unscrupulous in the form of George Vavasor. Her choices cause problems, hence the title. Lady Glencore, my favourite character, is torn between a seemingly loveless marraige and a handsome previous suitor who wants to run off with her.
She is very tempted to do so. The minor characters are marvelous with some wonderful comic creations; the love triangle of Mr Cheeseacre, Captain Bellfield and Aunt Greenow. Trollope works it all out in the end. Tolstoy rated Trollope very highly and the more I read of him the more I understand why.
Incidentally, a clergyman wrote to Trollope to complain that he had been forced to stop his daughters reading this novel; what better recommendation could you have!! View all 8 comments. This crime induces her to become engaged to her cousin who is so evil that Trollope made sure to give him a disfiguring facial scar lest the reader thinks for a moment George Vavasor is the tiniest bit good. George has a sister, Kate, and they have an Aunt, Mrs Greenow, a recently widowed woman set on enjoying herself after her financially satisfying but otherwise inane marriage to a much older man.
The fourth woman in this novel is Glencora Palliser married to one who will certainly be a very important character in these novels, Plantagenet Palliser, the man destined to become Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The Pallisers are by far the most interesting couple of all the duos and trios of this novel. Glencora is an extraordinary female character. She is in love with someone else, and is given plenty of opportunities to give in to those feelings.
Glencora has the vitality of Emma Bovary and the sense of misplacement of Effi Briest, but she manages to avoid the path of destruction that would inevitably befall her had she followed her heart. But he does try to connect with his wife, which is a wonderful way to subvert the trope of the aloof husband.
Trollope knows how to write women, which is just as well because the novel is entirely about the condition of women in society. The questions asked here are relevant only to them; the men of the story do not really understand or relate to them.
Only Kate manages to escape that fate but it is possible to argue that she had deposited all her faith and energy on her brother George as other women do with their husbands. This lends the novel a kind of duality, as if Trollope is toying with ideas of female emancipation only to reject them. He does not do it out of a sense of male superiority, but because he simply would not know how to write down those notions.
Their endings feel inevitable even when the narrative logically demands otherwise - in the case of Alice Vavasor, for instance, that she simply remains single. This is an excellent novel with good characters, good plot, good structure, interesting ideas. View all 4 comments. Feb 10, Rebecca rated it it was amazing Shelves: fiction. This is the second Trollope book I read, after a one-off of the Barset books, and I was astounded. I was 35 years old, newly married and with a child on the way, and the question, what must a woman do with her life was so pertinent.
I was stunned at how Alice's questions of how she could act in the world and satisfy herself were so fresh. Today we have many more opportunities, but frankly, when you choose to be a wife and mother, and to make that your priority, you are left, today, with the same This is the second Trollope book I read, after a one-off of the Barset books, and I was astounded. Today we have many more opportunities, but frankly, when you choose to be a wife and mother, and to make that your priority, you are left, today, with the same predicament as Alice.
I loved the respect and care that Trollope took with Alice. Also shocking from a Victorian man! Of course, as I read on in Trollope, I always find that his female characters the ones he likes are always his most rich and honored and beloved characters. The men are less likely to be funny, less likely to be honest, less likely to be truly worthy of respect.
Well, Plantagenet Palliser, I suppose, is without true fault, except for dullness, and his true love for Lady Glen dissolves that fault for me. A book I wish I could unread so I could read it again for the first time. Nov 18, Christine rated it really liked it Shelves: literature-english. The one thing that Trollope has over Dickens, and it is a huge thing, is that Trollope writes believable, sympathetic, intelligent women. Trollope cares more about women than Dickens ever did. While Dickens focuses on the major social crusades, Trollope spends time on how society can affect individuals in marriage.
Here is, he is examining how a arranged marriage would affect the parties involved, especially the woman. Trollope's focus on the upper class or the more education is no less importa The one thing that Trollope has over Dickens, and it is a huge thing, is that Trollope writes believable, sympathetic, intelligent women.
Trollope's focus on the upper class or the more education is no less important than Dicken's focus on the working conditions. The main problem in this book about love and forgiveness is that the two wronged men are far to saint like.
Perhaps this was intentional, not to show that men are better than women; but to show men what the correct reaction is. Dickens would go with the first option, but Trollope is far more sympathetic to his female characters.
I would have liked more of exploration of the character of Alice; does she do what she does because she has no choice? Is Trollope trying to show the reader the limits of a woman in terms of choice? Regardless, Dickens might have focused on the poor, but Trollope does offer a far more detailed look at the women of the time.
Jan 06, B0nnie rated it it was amazing. The author addresses us directly before we even begin reading. Forgive whom and for what? There is an unspoken suggestion in the question that you ought to forgive her. I've always been vaguely intrigued by the title of this novel.
Why did I wait so long to read it? It's delightful, a sort of cross between Dickens and Jane Austen. It could be the title of this book too. Or a plot outlin Can You Forgive Her? Or a plot outline. The main characters, three woman and six men, do not add up - there will be some hateship from those left standing before this musical chairs of a courtship is resolved. This book is written in the third person, but the writer comes in every now and then and has a remark for us, I am not going to describe the Vavasors' Swiss tour.
It would not be fair on my readers. It is true that I have just returned from Switzerland, and should find such a course of writing very convenient. But I dismiss the temptation, strong as it is.
Retro age, Satanas. The BBC made it into a mini series. I've watched several episodes and, like most BBC dramas, it's very good - but not nearly as good as the book.
My pretty dress is binding! No, I do NOT hunt vampires. Yoga adjustments are so difficult in these clothes! But darling, I tell you Bob Ross did not paint those mountains! These were illustrated by Phiz and another lesser known artist, E. Here are a few of the illustrations: I'm as round as your hat and as square as your elbow I am Baker you must put Dandy in the bar The most self-willed young woman I ever met in my life Burgo Fitzgerald Friendships will not come by ordering said Lady Glencora Alice Oh George, she said, you won't do that Trollope's writing method really bugged his contemporaries.
He revealed in his autobiography that he wrote words an hour, on a strict schedule. What a money grubber, thought Henry James. Can you forgive him? Jan 13, Chrissie rated it liked it Shelves: audible , great-britain , philo-psychol , victorian , read , love , classics , switzerland , relationships , humor.
ETA: Cecily read my review and didn't understand why I only gave it three stars. I think her question is absolutely legitimate; I don't explain that very well. I had trouble understanding one of the prime protagonists - Alice. Please see messages 5, 6, 7 and 8 below. I explain in more detail there. My track record with Victorian novels is poor; they always fail me. This is the first one that I really did enjoy. The characters are not caricatures; they are multi-dimensional.
These are real people that you will recognize still today. This is a book of character studies. BUT, you don't read it for plot; if you read it for plot the story is way too simple. Who will marry whom? What I really, really enjoyed were the lines.
Funny, funny humorous lines. Satirical, humor that is not nasty. Humor that keeps you on your toes because if you don't pay attention you will miss the joke. Subtle humor. The whole point of this novel has to be its humor, at least that is how it was for me.
It has a message. It is all about women and their place in society. It is also about conjugal relationships. I was amazed at how modern that message could be. It was written in serial format in and Don't think it is difficult to read because it was written so long ago; it is not in the least. It is not just a satire on English aristocracy and social norms; it is also about different kinds of people.
There is the flamboyant, the cautious, the rascal, the steadfast and yet at the same time they are nuanced so you understand why they behave as they do.
What I think is special is that characters, even those very different from myself, I came to understand. It felt like, for them to be true to themselves, they had to behave as they did. So what did the book teach me?
Well, I think I understand better, more intimately what it may have been like to live back then in a society so socially restrictive. You look at different people, with different personalities and of different social classes and you watch what they do and say. And you smile at every other sentence. So very much is said through humor. I liked that. The audiobook narration by Timothy West was totally fantastic. He just expressed himself so perfectly, capturing the identity of each character.
He knows when to pause to give the lines the proper effect. This is one of those times when the narrator is the icing on a delicious cake. This is the first Victorian novel that I really did enjoy.
I am totally loving this. This book will bore you if you read it to find out what happens, if you read it for plot! If you read it to find out who will marry whom. I am reading it for the hours spent with it. I am reading it for the lines. I am reading it for the care that is taken in drawing the characters. I am reading it for the dialog and for watching each step the characters make in their indecision. Time has to be taken to accurately describe each step along the way.
It is the path that is important, more than where you end up. The characters are complicated. They do one thing one day and the opposite the next; they are just like real people.
Their ambivalence and indecision is what makes them genuine. This is a book for readers who enjoy character studies. Real, complicated people, not caricatures. It is a book for those who enjoy subtle humor. Satire definitely, but still sweet. I thought I knew how this would end; I no longer do. View all 14 comments. Jul 03, Rosamund Hodge added it Shelves: , victoriana , Alice Vavasour is engaged to John Grey, a kind man whom she loves, but she fears that she will be stifled by his quiet life.
Alice breaks off her engagement with John, and though she swore years ago never to love George again, she finds herself slowly drawn back to him. I really, really wish that Alice could get together with Alice Vavasour is engaged to John Grey, a kind man whom she loves, but she fears that she will be stifled by his quiet life. I really, really wish that Alice could get together with Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch and form a support group for idealistic young women who want to live vicariously through their husbands and make horrible relationship decisions because of it.
I absolutely adore Alice: her pride, her principles, her fierce conscience, and her chronic self-doubt. I love how those qualities all blend together, so that it's impossible for her or even the reader to tell exactly where one starts and another ends. And as painful as it is to read, I love the depiction of how Alice's fierce independence doesn't always protect her from manipulation--the way that it sometimes leaves her open to it, because she can't bear to admit that anyone is influencing her--because it rings absolutely true.
Trollope is brilliant at showing the tangled ways that people make decisions, and I think Alice is one of his star examples.
And then there are all the passages where Trollope asks his readers if they can possibly forgive Alice even though by breaking her engagement "she had thrown off from her that wondrous aroma of precious delicacy, which is the greatest treasure of womanhood. She had assumed the command of the ship, and had thrown it upon the rocks, and she felt that she never ought to take the captain's place again. It was well for her that he who was to be captain was one whom she respected as thoroughly as she loved him.
And yet, I don't think you can dismiss the novel as merely sexist. Trollope does, after all, spend pages and pages arguing that Alice should be forgiven. And then there's Lady Glencora--one of the major secondary characters--who is a stereotypical ditzy society girl, except that she gets one of the major moral dramas of the novel: deciding whether or not to leave her husband and run away with another man.
Even though she spends most of the novel seriously contemplating adultery, she's portrayed extremely sympathetically. Not to mention that one of the main reasons she's unhappy in her marriage is that she hasn't yet had children and she knows her value depends largely on her production of a male heir--and Trollope's portrayal of that is biting.
And I haven't even mentioned Kate Vavasour, Alice's best friend and George's sister, who loves Alice, idolizes George, and has spent years campaigning for them to marry. Trollope could give some modern writers lessons in how to write interesting and dramatic female friendship.
So it's not a novel with which a modern reader can entirely sympathize, but it's brilliant and fascinating and painful and fun.
Definitely one of my favorite Trollope novels so far. View 1 comment. Apr 18, Suzannah rated it it was amazing Shelves: classics. Apparently this one is his longest? Did I mind? Go and boil your head, Stephen King. I read it in two weeks, but I could have done it in one marathon sitting if I didn't need to eat, sleep, and work. Very few books are genuinely unputdownable for me, but this 19th century tome did it easily.
I can't say much that Rosamund hasn't already said more concisely in her review , but will doubtless manage to say something here. Can I forgive her? It is my considered opinion that Alice needs no forgiveness. Alice is an absolute legend and would be my favourite character in the book by a wide margin if it wasn't for Lady Glencora.
From the first couple of chapters, I could tell that Alice was going to jilt John Grey, and John Grey looked awesome enough at first glance that I could tell it was going to be a bad idea - especially with charming bad-boy George waiting in the wings to scoop her up.
But then we see the reasoning behind Alice's determination to end her engagement, and it was an explanation that made complete sense. After all, John Grey is little more than an affable idler.
Alice, who has no pressing financial need to marry, is a town mouse with ambitions towards political influence, and John Grey has no intention whatsoever to allow her to follow these ambitions. And as clearly as she understands George's shortcomings, at least a life with him would allow her to follow her own interests. Alice, in other words, is a woman with a calling in a world, and indeed to some extent in a novel, that fails to recognise the legitimacy of a woman's calling.
Alice is someone with a fierce sense of independence; I loved how Trollope uses this as both her greatest strength and greatest weakness; independence, we see, is no safeguard against manipulation. But it is absolutely a safeguard against frontal attack, and in conflict after conflict Alice comes off as an absolute legend, and I loved her.
I wasn't a fan of the way Trollope pooh-poohed Alice's dilemma, her choice between love and calling. But just when I thought he was treating the question too lightly - enter Lady Glencora. Lady Glencora Palliser is a brilliant creation - a dedicated troll and something of a disaster girl; a friend pointed out how unusual she is in terms of female characters in Victorian fiction. I've successfully avoided enough Victorian fiction that I can't really be the judge here, but imagine her next to, say, Dickens' Esther Summerson.
Cora, at one point, confesses her sheer inability to behave in any remotely proper fashion, and backs it up by never, ever neglecting an opportunity to yank a chain or stir a pot. Thematically, she's important to the story because she has married someone she has nothing in common with.
Plantagenet Palliser is giant nerd whose life ambition is to be Chancellor of the Excheque and put the House of Commons to sleep every evening with a list of nice, comforting numbers. Glencora not only has no interest in any of this, but hasn't even managed to do her duty by Plantagenet and produce a son I was tempted to wonder at one stage whether Planty's truly heroic levels of cluelessness had something to do with this.
Glencora may be a subplot character, but her predicament is genuinely heartrending: without love, common goals, or children to bind her to her husband, she finds herself wishing herself dead or disgraced just to be shot of the whole impossible situation. See, fiction is the art of empathy, and Trollope was a great enough novelist, whatever his personal views, to vividly imagine and empathise with the predicament of women in his society in ways that are still depressingly rare even today, even among authors who would disagree with Trollope's views on the sexes.
As I said above, and will say again in this review, I for one have some areas of disagreement with him here, but the genuine respect, empathy, and love he shows towards his female characters in this book is absolutely exemplary and one of the things that make this a truly great novel.
By and large the male characters are not as compelling as the female characters ironically, it's the one thing I could have wished the novel to do better. George, with the shocking backstory, the dreadful scar, and the flair for melodrama, is a large part of the reason I loved the book. Oh, don't get me wrong: George is the Absolute Worst, and I wanted him to die in a fire.
George feels like an intruder from a Bronte novel. He was the absolute worst but also, for dramatic purposes, the best. I loved to hate him. Kate deserves a few words. She's one of those characters Trollope does so well, the sort of person who begins rather contemptibly but goes through a terrible lot of character development. By the end, I was cheering for her.
I found the subplot with her cheerfully mendacious aunt, Mrs Greenow, to be extremely funny but the least interesting part of the book; all the same, it's one of those delightful little character pieces Trollope excelled at. Trollope asks, but let's be honest, the character we are really in danger of not forgiving here is John Grey. John Grey, who responds to Alice's sincere concerns by brushing her off, and telling her that, basically, she's mentally ill. While the man had many good qualities, I didn't see any particular reason why, having got shot of cousin George, she had to go and marry John Grey at all.
The thing left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Now, while I did appreciate Trollope's comments on the importance of doing something with your life to benefit others, the happiness or otherwise of the ending, for Alice, depends entirely on whether you think John Grey is beginning to understand that he needs to pay attention to her conscience and vocation, which he brushed off at the start of the book.
His final line in the book lends some hope to this, but the fact is that although he abandons the life of a gentlemanly idler, he does so not because Alice convinced him to do so, but because of Mr Palliser. I think many women have been in the identical situation of saying something to a very self-assured man which he shrugs off, only to see him take it seriously coming from the lips of another man - thus proving that it was never the message he objected to, but the messenger.
In the end, I think I disagree with Trollope that a shared love, home, and children is enough for any husband and wife to have in common. There also has to be an ability to support one another in pursuing a vocation, whether shared or separate. I grew up within a subculture not in my own family, thankfully that assumed no woman could ever have an individual vocation, and which took very seriously the kind of thing Trollope says in this story - perhaps more unctuously than sincerely - about the perils of feminine independence.
Lady Glencora and her husband were made happy by the birth of a son, Lord Silverbridge , who would become the future Duke of Omnium. Now, for the first time, the shadow of Today, Can You Forgive Her? Of Can You Forgive Her? I cannot speak with too great affection, though I do not know that of itself it did very much to increase my reputation. As regards the story, it was formed chiefly on that of the play The humourous characters, which are also taken from the play In fact, she jilts both her admirers twice, and ends up by marrying the gentleman.
Twined round this story in counterpoint are the mildly comic affairs of the Widow Greenow whom most of us will forget : and the marital fortunes of the Pallisers. In fact, the Pallisers had first appeared in The Small House at Allington , written three years earlier.
Barely a couple of pages show us the somewhat wooden Plantagenet being rebuffed by the equally wooden but virtuous Lady Dumbello, to the dismay of his family, and in particular its head, the Duke of Omnium.
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