Reading Middlemarch
George Eliot's (Mary Ann Evans) Middlemarch is on my list of ten iconic, canonic novels. I've decided to read it now.
Currently through page 1,026 (of 1,026).
It's a very engrossing novel. Critics say it unfolds more than pulling one along with plot interest, though the characters are interesting and one does get eager to see what will happen with them.
Eliot's main distinctive as a novelist is portraying psychological and emotional phenomena accurately and to a close degree.
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The Bantam Classics paperback edition is very handsome, and I prefer the font the Bantam Classics editions use. I'm not referring to the painting on the cover; the latest Bantam Classics designs are in my opinion well done. Also, with less words on each page it gives the impression that you are moving along at a brisker pace, necessary in a Victorian era novel in parts (any long novel, really).
What is my list of ten iconic, canonic novels?
Don Quixote
Tom Jones
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
Anna Karenina
Brothers Karamazov
Moby Dick
Middlemarch
Ulysses
Magic Mountain
I include Ulysses knowing it's a bit (or a lot) overrated. Also, if you've read Virginia Woolf (who thought Ulysses overrated, by the way) you get a lot of what Ulysses offers stylistically.
I don't include Proust because I fortunately set a rule that the ten novels have to be big yet only one volume.
Columnist George Will is a fan of Middlemarch. I remember him writing during a political season, as a response to the common question are you better off now than you were four years ago? George Will wrote: "Have you read Middlemarch in the last four years?"
Henry James, that old bachelor, fell in love with Dorothea Brooke. Paraphrase: "You meet her, when you've ceased to believe in immortality, and you believe again..." Probably because she's described as handsome, because you know Henry James...
With George Eliot you're not going to get high spiritual understanding or foundational metaphor or grand arcs of symbolic destination, etc., etc., but you will get human nature portrayed well and lively, and in that she doesn't back away from the difficulty of finding language to present psychological and emotional phenomena to a very close degree, as I mentioned somewhere up above previously. Sometimes these efforts can seem to trail off into thin rabbit trails of ever-receding and thinning ideas that need to be read a couple of time at least to get their meaning, but these are really few and far in-between.
I have noticed a bit a padding at around the 700 page mark, going by my edition, where some episodes are a bit too drawn out and also where some characters are introduced and plot complications are introduced that seem out of place with the general tone of the novel overall. Pot boiler type things. Yet I would say they are just within the limits of not being too out of place.
One thing about her style is she doesn't give a lot of help to the reader in getting a good sense of what main characters look like. We're left to do that pretty much solely on our own based on how they speak and think and with just a hint of external details Eliot does give us. But the problem comes in where a character we've determined the looks of in our mind early on in the novel is then called on to a role that clashes with our image we've developed of him or her. For instance, a main character is introduced early in the novel who later is made an equal of another main character in terms of being a love interest, and we never imagined him to be at that level. This forces the reader to back up and re-imagine the character. This might sound shallow, but this is a novel of manners where each character inhabits a very rigid level in society and where the characters themselves are often commenting on looks and so on. This is really just a small criticism...
I'm at that point towards the end of a long novel where I'm thinking: "What will I read next?!" Yet I've still got 185 pages to go on this one! It seems like a small amount, yet when you've only been reading 30 or so pages a day it's almost a week. Of course you tend to speed up when you see the finish line, so it won't take me 6 days to read 185 pages.
I'm a deliberate reader when it comes to works of literature. One of those people who clock 300 pages a day I am not.
Though I once read the Bible complete (KJV) in 66 days. It strained my eyes a bit though.
I want to say the last quarter of Middlemarch is greatly inferiour to the first three quarters, but I don't want to say it in a way to put anyone off from reading the novel altogether. It's worth reading. I just think G.E. didn't quite know where to take it all after the ... well, I won't give anything away... It gets first a bit pot boilerish, then a bit soap opera-ish, yet it is what it is. It has been a good companion for the time I've been reading it. The characters are worthy of your time and acquaintance.
Well, I've finished Middlemarch. Kind of sad. Eliot created a true character in Dorothea Brooke. I don't think she really knew what to do with her. Just as Dorothea didn't really know what to do with herself.
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