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Title: A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch, Peter J. Reed ISBN: 0-14-118617-8 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 February, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.54 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Murdoch's monster
Comment: Iris Murdoch's novels are addictive. Since a friend gave me a copy of "The Bell" a few months ago, I've read almost nothing but Murdoch--11 novels in all. In fact, I checked out six at one time from my university library so as soon as I finished one I could start on another. I've become a chain-reader. This one may be the best one so far. It's certainly the most chilling, if not the most riveting. It's a good place to start for the uninitiated because it's so incredibly engaging and entertaining, althougt not necessarily fun. All of the basic Murdoch elements are there--the complexity of love and life; the overwhelming essentialness of love to life; the frailties, faults, and follies of basically good people; the way the lives of good people can be wrecked by both their own carelessness and by intentional acts of evil; and despite all of this, an odd optimism that life is good and that all will be well. ... Julius is even more frightening, however, because you will recognize in him someone you know or have known. Although there are no monsters, ghosts, or serial killers, the book is as suspensful as any of the popular horror or crime novel that routinely makes the bestseller lists today. And no "romance" writer alive knows more about love and sex than Murdoch. I always finish Murdoch's books feeling unsettled but strangely satisfied and always awestruck by what she is able to do with plot, characters, ideas, and words. Put down your Stephen King, your John Grisham, or your Danielle Steel and pick up this book instead.
Rating: 5
Summary: A more than fairly satisfying read
Comment: Brilliant! This novel has everything I look for in a truly great book: complex characters, deft plotting, luminous prose, and profound insight into the human condition. Iris Murdoch knew what it was to be human. She understood our aspirations and longings, our blind spots, our frailties, and our capacities for love and betrayal. She's the only writer I know of who can hold her reader's rapt attention throughout a novel in which the action consists almost entirely of dialogue between the various characters. (If you think that sounds boring, believe me, it's anything but!) In this age of high-speed internet, cable tv, and the unending pursuit of distraction, that's no small feat!
I recommend this novel unreservedly. I started reading Iris Murdoch a couple of months ago and since then, have read no other fiction. This is the sixth of her novels I've read and my favorite to date. If, like me, you want fiction to illuminate the human condition and to give you more than an enjoyable way to pass a few hours, then give yourself to Murdoch. She's deepened my thought, sharpened my wit, and made me more compassionate, while holding me spellbound and fascinated at every turn.
Rating: 5
Summary: Good Against Evil and the Consolations of Love.
Comment: Iris Murdoch's novels cannot be fully appreciated nor savored in all of their richness without some awareness of her philosophical concerns.
This is the story of Morgan, whose return to London after a love affair in America with the sinister, mysterious and seductive (in every sense of the word) "Julius," brings her to the home of her sister Hilda and that sister's husband, Rupert. Their troubled son Peter makes an appearance; and Morgan also encounters her good but estranged husband, Tallis; and a lively circle of friends appears as well, including the gay couple Simon and Axel.
But then Julius returns. His seemingly quiet entry into the lives of these flawed, but oh-so human people, wreaks disaster and tragedy.
Dame Iris underscores and dramatizes her concern with the nature of evil as the expression of the human tendency to be seduced by the glamor of power and intelligence into abdicating simple and obvious duties of humanity. She illustrates her notion of love as a kind of powerful attention (or Kantian "Achtung") and an immersion in the reality of the moment and the Other; and goodness as the absence of selfish immersion in fantasy and escape or "muddle," and involvement in "concern" (Heidegger) or "engagement" (Sartre) with the pain of others.
This is a brilliant and wise book.
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Title: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (Penguin Books) by Iris Murdoch ISBN: 0140041117 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: March, 1984 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Bell (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0141186690 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, Martha C. Nussbaum, P. A. Loxias ISBN: 0142180114 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch ISBN: 0140020039 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1976 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, Mary Kinzie ISBN: 014118616X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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