Making His World a Little Colder

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
New York : Signet Classic, [1999]
xv, 428 p. : map ; 18 cm.   

I have a soft spot in my heart for Hardy, and I've wanted to re-read Jude the Obscure for a long time - for over thirty years in fact! With some time off this winter break and a bit of travelling to do, I took Jude along with me and read it. It is a masterful novel, but incredibly bleak and depressing.  Did I mention that it is really depressing?

The plot revolves around the tragedies that strike two individuals who dare to break with the conventions of marriage and class in 19th century England. Jude of the title is a young man who is seduced by and marries a woman to whom he is physically attracted, but with whom he has nothing in common, and then falls desperately in love with a cousin who shares his passions for learning, thinking, and defying convention.  Jude is also in love with the intellectual life of the university, but finds it closed to him because of his rural, working-class status.  Throw in another marriage, an unwanted child, another lifeless marriage, and the censure of community and you have all the elements for a disastrous tragedy - and that is what Hardy gives us.

As bleak as the novel is, it really is stunningly modern, and is considered by many to be one of the great novels in the English canon.  Though Hardy is very circumspect about sexual matters - sometimes you have to re-read a section to realize that two people have been intimate with each other - he is ruthless in his dissection of the hypocrisies of religion and marriage.  They are both shown as institutions that offer little but constraint and unhappiness to individuals.

I enjoyed reading Jude again after all these years, but I'm not sure high school students would enjoy it so much, unless they are already fans of Hardy - like me!

Solid Gone

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
New York : Broadway Books, [2014]
422 p. ; 21 cm.

Publisher's Weekly describes Flynn's Gone Girl as the "tale of a marriage gone toxically wrong" which "gradually emerge[s] through alternating accounts by Nick and Amy, both unreliable narrators in their own ways."  I couldn't have said it better myself - so I won't!  Booklist calls it a "compelling thriller and a searing portrait of marriage" which it is, though I'd say it's a pretty twisted and horrible portrait to be sure.  Booklist does note that Flynn "possesses a disturbing worldview, one considerably amped up by her twisted sense of humor." That is definitely true.

Almost all reviews note that it is compulsively readable and I have to agree.  But it does present a rather sordid and extreme view of human relationships and has some pretty crude generalizations about men, women and their interactions.

I think the strength of the book is the plotting (which is creative and unpredictable) and the use of the unreliable narrators - which keeps the reader guessing and on edge.  

Anyone working with young adults should be aware that though there is not a lot of graphic sex in the novel,  sexual situations are frequently referred to - and occasionally described in very explicit and crude terms.  It's definitely a novel for mature readers, but there will be a lot of requests for the book given its phenomenal success and the successful movie version of it which opened the day I finished the book, Oct. 3, 2014.

The title of this post is a nod to a Carter family song - and it's wonderful performance by the late Doc Watson.