I read this book for the third time in
forty-some years. I wanted to read it again to refresh my sense of what makes a
book great and to answer again the questions some people have about why this book
is important.
I very much enjoyed following, once again, Isabel Archer’s
trajectory of an intelligent woman who makes an unwise decision and follows
through. I also enjoyed the characterizations of several of the other
characters, set in their time and place. I wanted to read
something to help me lift my subject in my next novel.
When Isabel Archer, a young American woman with looks, wit, and imagination, arrives in Europe, she sees the world as "a place of brightness, of free expression, of irresistible action". She turns aside from suitors who offer her their wealth and devotion to follow her own path. But that way leads to disillusionment and a future as constricted as "a dark narrow alley with a dead wall at the end". In a conclusion that is one of the most moving in modern fiction, Isabel makes her final choice. "The Portrait of a Lady" is considered the masterpiece of James's middle…
I read this book for the second time in thirty-five years and have seen the original film based on it at least three times. The novel does a great job of portraying the situation of a boy visiting the country estate of a classmate whose family is in a higher social class.
The book has a successful narrative design of frame narration and first-person narrator. It achieves a great portrayal of human motivations and the lasting effects that self-serving people have on the people they impress.
As with The Portrait of a Lady, I wanted to re-read a novel to help me renew my sense of what makes a book great, and I hoped that that sense would help me in the next novel I wrote.
L.P. Hartley's moving exploration of a young boy's loss of innocence The Go-Between is edited with an introduction and notes by Douglas Brooks-Davies in Penguin Modern Classics.
'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'
When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The…
I
read this book because I wanted to read an acclaimed recent novel that would
show the best of current Western fiction by a female author. This novel has a
compelling storyline with the Captain’s mission to deliver the girl and
fulfill his responsibility. It also has a great sense of time and place and is not ponderous to read.
This book contributed to my understanding of the potential of
Western fiction.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his…
Lonesome Range is the story
of Lane Weller, a man in late-nineteenth-century Wyoming who falls in love with
Cora McGavin, a married woman who says she hopes to escape her bondage in order
to be with him.
Lane loses his job and takes to doing ranch work and day labor
as he lives on the range and sees his question (of whether it was real or just
something to lie about) through to the end.
This is a literary Western novel
that does not please some readers who are looking for a conventional
shoot-‘em-up western with easy answers. Still, readers who enjoy reading something
a notch higher find it fulfilling.
