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Title: Bleak House (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Nicola Bradbury ISBN: 0-14-143972-6 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Dickens' best
Comment: (possible spoilers)
I have just started reading this book again and notice that the Chancellor asks Mr. Kenge if Esther is party to the suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. Mr. Kenge assures the great man that she isn't. Dramatic irony! She is the illegitimate daughter of one of the parties. Yes, everybody complains about Esther's sentimentality. But as the part-narrator, Dickens uses her to make some funny and sharp observations about the other characters, especially the woman who eventually becomes Esther's (reluctant?) mother-in-law, and is always going on about her aristocratic Welsh and Scots relations. Esther is a lonely child brought up in a loveless home - can we blame her for trying to gain some love for herself, her stated ambition? Isn't being sweet and kind a ploy that's likely to succeed? I think we're meant to conclude that it wouldn't have worked unless she really was sweet and kind. Dickens almost gets away with marrying her to her guardian, a man at least twice her age. (He left his wife for a 17-year-old.)
Rating: 4
Summary: It's mighty mighty, just lettin' it all hang out
Comment: Academics seem to have declared this Dickens's best book, and although I enjoyed it a great deal I must say that I enjoy Character Focused Dickens much more than Epic Sprawl Dickens. David Copperfield - even though I can see how it's more flawed than this book - is such a warm and beautiful book, completely unforgettable. Even Pickwick, which is clearly inferior to Bleak House, is a book I would much rather reread.
Nonetheless, Dickens has like ten novels that everyone should read, and this is one of them. I only have one warning: DON'T BUY THIS EDITION! There's a cheap edition that has, as an introduction, Nabokov's lecture on Bleak House - which is the most helpful guide you can ever ask for, as well as a wonderful and hilarious piece of writing in itself. Also, these new black Penguins are expensive and have a tendency to get all scratched up immediately.
Bleak House is probably Dickens's most elegantly constructed book. The quality of his prose was never better - just read the first twenty pages: astonishing. But (I know, everyone complains about the sentimentality) Esther Summerson is INTOLERABLE! Every time she narrated a chapter and was more and more good and humble I was tempted to throw the book against a wall. She is a horrible horrible character - Dora was something like this in David Copperfield, but at least she dies. And I suppose there are plenty of others like Esther all over Dickens, but rarely are they such major characters who actually get to narrate parts of the book. Big mistake, Charles. Maybe it was necessary for unfolding of the plot, but - still - please.
This book failed to arouse human interest in me until the acceleration of the Lady Dedlock plot (of course, anyone of average intelligence can see every twist in Dickens coming a hundred pages ahead) - but still, she's a fascinating character.
Find the other edition of the book: it should be read.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of Dickens' best
Comment: This is one of Dickens' most mature, sophisticated, and modern works, largely free of the sentimentality and crowd-pleasing melodrama for which he is known. An angry work filled with spleen about the inhumanity of the legal system and the way it grinds people up and spits them out, Bleak House is also notable for the strong ray of hope it holds out in the person of its protagonist, Esther Summerson, and her guardian, Tom Jarndyce. The story concerns an interminable legal case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that has been grinding on for so long that nobody involved with it really knows what it's about anymore, and any money that could possibly be won by any of the litigants has long been swallowed up by legal fees. Caught up helplessly in this incomprehensible mess are Tom Jarndyce and his orphaned wards Esther Summerson and the kissing cousins John and Ada Clare. Also involved in the affair in some mysterious way are the haughty and aristocratic Dedlocks and an enigmatic legal clerk known only as Nemo--the Latin word for "no one." Part mystery, part legal thriller, Bleak House is also one of Dickens' most satisfying books for a modern reader. As a spirited indictment of the legal system it ranks with Nicholas Nickleby and Our Mutual Friend as among Dickens' strongest statements on the side of the poor and disenfranchised against the faceless powers that would crush them.
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Title: Middlemarch by George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton ISBN: 0141439548 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: Little Dorrit (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Stephen Wall, Helen Small ISBN: 0140434925 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Our Mutual Friend (Penquin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Adrian Poole ISBN: 0140434976 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: David Copperfield (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Jeremy Tambling ISBN: 0140434941 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: The Pickwick Papers (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Mark Wormald ISBN: 0140436111 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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