Quote:
Originally Posted by fantasyfan
You're very welcome. I hope you will share your insights when you read it  |
I trust that that you suspected what it was that you were going to get, so will not be a shock
.
I have just spent a couple of days looking at this book (
Persuasion) with a light read through about only a quarter of it before I decided it really was not for me to get seriously into. So, as I didn't read the whole book, my reaction could be regarded as shallowly based. While the book, being part of Austen's works, has a place in the development of the English Novel and is a worthwhile satire and commentary of one aspect of her contemporary society, I am only speaking from the perspective of my own selfish reading for enjoyment.
First, I do not get on well with books that are structured around the detailed trivialities of the lives of people that have nothing to do or offer, especially when there is emphasis on their inter-matchmaking, pettiness's such as the characters' puddle deep opinions of each other, etc. So it turned out that the book was off to a poor start with me from the outset
. That said I felt that the satire and social commentary of the book could have done well for me in other hands that wrote without the ponderousness I felt.
I found the prose to be poor when looked at from the point of view of a reader valuing fluidity and emphasis on clear communication. Without claiming this is what went on, the prose reeks to me of being seriously overworked and as not having come from a writer from whom the story flowed out of their pen onto the paper in a natural and easy way (perhaps that is a reason why other novels of hers stayed in her hands for such long periods of time before publishing?).
There are seriously long pieces of narration that I thought really needed breaking up into many sentences instead being semi-divided by the multiplicity of colons and semicolons that are used. Furthermore, the same often applies to the characters' own speech. Even taking into account the likelihood that real life people of that society and time spoke very formally, the seriously long monologues with thoughts separated only by a fleet of colons and semicolons I found both tedious and characterless in manner of speech. I felt that the work could do with a severe run through with the objective of attaining better flow of the prose. I instead felt the possibility that the author had gone through with the objective of adding as much as possible into each sentence and to hell with how long and clumsy that made them to read.
At first I though that maybe the things I did not like about the prose were just typical of the age of the novel, but in fact I do not see things such as being frequent in the works of her contemporaries (Walter Scott, for example), her predecessors (Defoe, for example) and those coming after (Dickens, for example). I note that I found similar things that I did not like with 20th Century Woolf's
Mrs Dalloway, that book being further compromised for my selfish reading by the use of cryptic passages of imprecise solution or which were incorrect comparisons in reality.
All that said
there were sparks of writing that I thought very well done (who could have guessed I was going to now say that?
). For example, the passages around where Walter Elliott talks about "the most deplorable-looking personage you can imagine" of Admiral Baldwin. Austen is then into, for example, having her characters speaking in clear, lively and flowing prose with them speaking naturally as recognisable individuals rather than in characterless monologues. Why she did not keep that up I have no idea, but, of course, she was not writing to please me
. Without doubt it quite rightly pleases others.