I have mixed feelings about this book. It's delivery is more impressive than its substance. It is told by an unreliable narrator in a chatty fireside style, but the narrator reveals that he wrote it over a long period and the information that he gives away and also his attitude shifts throughout the...
This book: it is so quiet, so unassuming that it sneaks up on you. You are maybe even sort of wondering why it’s a classic when it tells (you think) such a banal story. But in fact, while telling you one story, eventually another bleeds through. The presenting story: a man of a certain age, disencha...
Ford Madox Ford's 1915 novella The Good Soldier famously begins with the line, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard" (Part I, Chapter I*). It is a truly tragic tale. All the characters are caught between their own personality flaws and the expectations society holds for what are considered "...
I liked it. Mostly. To be precise, up to two-thirds; after that, the subject matter, the narrator (for it is largely a retrospective, first-person narrative by a middle-aged white male), and the style (increasingly exalted - think schoolgirls, not nobility) began to tire me. I think it was partly be...
The Good Soldier is the story of an American and an English couple and their various and interesting interactions. It's told in an Impressionist style, which I don't really like, to be honest, although I can see the literary merit in it - i.e. it's not told in chronological order but as if a real pe...
23/8 - I admit, I picked this book up because it's in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die book and because I thought this book had something to do with WWI. I've read the first 20 pages so far and while I was reading it I kept expecting something war related to crop up. I have now been enl...
23/8 - I admit, I picked this book up because it's in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die book and because I thought this book had something to do with WWI. I've read the first 20 pages so far and while I was reading it I kept expecting something war related to crop up. I have now been enl...
The Good Soldier is so heartbreakingly beautiful. I wonder if I have ever felt so conflicted when a book came to an end, on the one hand I didn't want the experience to end - I unearthed gems on every page, gems of solemnity, disappointment, angst, and insight; on the other, each page filled me with...
The characters were interesting, but not even Frank Muller's beautiful audio performance could hold my interest with the meandering monologue that apparently makes up the entirety of this story. I gave up trying about 50 minutes in.
December's bookclub selection - a story about two couples and the disaster that arises when one one of the men has an affair with the other man's wife. What made this book such a great read was that it was told by the cuckholded husband as a flashback - the perfect unreliable narrator. His moods a...
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