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.