![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
getting all deep on you with the books
May. 2nd, 2011 09:36 pmI continue to work through Middlemarch. It isn't that it is dull -far from it. It is just so... much. There are a million details at play and the book is about so many things. (besides the people of Middlemarch) It is about rural life, politics, religion, the changing pace of a culture, medicine and people. You aren't just reading one novel but several all at once. I can see why AS Byatt wrote the introduction for this edition. After reading The Children's Hour, Byatt approaches a novel the same way. A novel is not just being about one person or one subject. Both authors throw you into an ocean that is filled with so much.
I feel like I have to take notes because there is so much I want to remember and there are times when I want to cry out, "YES EXACTLY" or "oh damn George Eliot knows what is what." I am also struck with how cinematic her writing was. There are these scenes that seemed as if they were meant for the movies. What an eye.
There is the scene where Lydgate meets Rosamond and he hands her her riding whip (she had been out horseback riding and was about to leave)
He reached the whip before she did, and turned to present it to her. She bowed and looked at him: he of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze.
It is a classic sort of scene -you can recall it from Romeo & Juliet and from the film perspective -West Side Story when Tony and Maria notice one another. But the description is just so perfect.
In regards to the subject of medicine, it was obvious that there was change afoot in how medicine was taught and practiced and you see Lydgate as being part of this as he is part of a newer school of thought.
There was also a description of a character (Bulstrode) who is rather evangelical in his nature. He subscribes to a form of religion is that is rather narrow in belief. The description is kind of timeless and hilariously appropriate in this day and age. (it was said by another religious figure [Farebrother] who holds a more nuanced and thoughtful view of things and people.)
I am opposed to Bulstrode in many ways. I don't like the set he belongs to: they are a narrow ignorant set, and do more to make their neighbours uncomfortable than to make them better. Their system is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.
Talk about the ultimate smack-down. Damn this book is awesome.
I will have to write more as I go along.
I feel like I have to take notes because there is so much I want to remember and there are times when I want to cry out, "YES EXACTLY" or "oh damn George Eliot knows what is what." I am also struck with how cinematic her writing was. There are these scenes that seemed as if they were meant for the movies. What an eye.
There is the scene where Lydgate meets Rosamond and he hands her her riding whip (she had been out horseback riding and was about to leave)
He reached the whip before she did, and turned to present it to her. She bowed and looked at him: he of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze.
It is a classic sort of scene -you can recall it from Romeo & Juliet and from the film perspective -West Side Story when Tony and Maria notice one another. But the description is just so perfect.
In regards to the subject of medicine, it was obvious that there was change afoot in how medicine was taught and practiced and you see Lydgate as being part of this as he is part of a newer school of thought.
There was also a description of a character (Bulstrode) who is rather evangelical in his nature. He subscribes to a form of religion is that is rather narrow in belief. The description is kind of timeless and hilariously appropriate in this day and age. (it was said by another religious figure [Farebrother] who holds a more nuanced and thoughtful view of things and people.)
I am opposed to Bulstrode in many ways. I don't like the set he belongs to: they are a narrow ignorant set, and do more to make their neighbours uncomfortable than to make them better. Their system is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.
Talk about the ultimate smack-down. Damn this book is awesome.
I will have to write more as I go along.
