the good soldier could not write a good book, i am saddened to say. dark were the days that i spent laboriously poring over the prosodic pages of ford’s fitzgerald-esque social novel. it attempted and failed to do what ‘the beautiful and damned’ weaved seamlessly into the canon of nihilistic literature.

to ford’s credit, his writing spares no skeptic. i adore a book that philosophises about the nonsense intrinsic to sentimentality. the narrator we sit with through the 180 pages holds a compelling tale at hand but chooses to unravel it in such a strange manner that it simply loses its intrigue. somehow, a string of affairs is lost to the minutiae of an obsessive and passive voice that dwells only in retrospect, never in the unfolding.

in a sense, i can sympathise with john powell, though he begs none. love and attraction are visceral experiences, brutal and merciless. they are equally vague. boundaries are blurred, words are misunderstood, gestures misinterpreted. body language is as reliable as the suggestive cadence of a monotone voice.

i adore an aimless narrative, but this one did not hit the mark for me. the characters were only discernible by way of their entanglements, and our agreed-upon antagonist (edward) is breezed over at the crux of his appearance.

none gets what he truly desires for fear of expressing it to himself. unless spoken, the desire cannot and will not exist. perhaps this is also a result of not knowing what object that desires resides in. i equally did not know what i was looking for in this book. philosophical murmurs, poetic prose and prolonged languishing i found — a narrator loitering in the pages with the sweet hum of neatly arranged words. much more concrete matters were lacking.

Brilliant example of modernism: the meandering, non-chronological story; the unreliable, ambivalent narrator; a full complement of Freudian neuroses. The plot gets a tad melodramatic toward its denouement, but the execution is so clever, so self-aware, so ripe for analysis - it's my uni self's wet dream. What begins as a novel of 'poor, dear' people in love becomes a novel of 'sensualists with imbecile fears.'

The writing is so good and the fact that it's over 100 years old blows my mind. The book, for it's soapy, messy, regressive/progressive morality could be written today. And Ford's flow at times feels like the antecedent of the Beats. But, there's a very purposeful circularity to the telling of this story that meant we revisited things again and again and so often when I didn't need to. It's a piercing dive into male/female relationship issues, sexual entanglements, infidelity and the reality of many long term relationships, all cut through with an American's eyes on the English approach. This he does with a frankness that feels well ahead of his time. Very curious about his other writing.

I had to read this book for my Brit Lit class, and this book sucked! It was such a hard read, and Dowell has to be the most oblivious and stupid character I have ever read! There were only a few parts that were funny, but mostly it just sucked. His wife cheated on him and not once did he realize it! He didn't even know she faked a heart attack! The only saving grace fro. This book was that it was pretty short, just not short enough. I have to say the end really did surprise me, I did not see that coming! Overall it was an okay book, and Dowell is a moron.

So bitchy and gossipy. Spill that tea Dowell!