This is such a wonderful conversation! I'm so enjoying reading through everyone's notes here. Throwing in a few very lightweight thoughts:
-I appreciated Mona's note on my favorite line from chapter one: "The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.…
This is such a wonderful conversation! I'm so enjoying reading through everyone's notes here. Throwing in a few very lightweight thoughts:
-I appreciated Mona's note on my favorite line from chapter one: "The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it." I found this quite funny on a first read and then devastatingly sad on the second.
-Going into my first chapter of Middlemarch, I'd just finished HBO's Succession, another story in which "intimacy, shame, jealousy and competition" between siblings is very much in the foreground. I've been thinking a lot recently about the similarities and differences between great TV and great novels^. And I'll say -- launching into the world of Middlemarch really took the sting out of coming to the end of Jesse Armstrong's great TV show. As effective as Succession was as a drama, there's something really exciting about inhabiting the world of a novel alongside a great narrator (and hopefully with a group of friends) that I don't think TV can replicate.
So with you on Point One! Like, she cannot even imagine an equal relationship with a man as a source of pleasure. And likewise re Succession. I thought Succession was great, but I don't think it takes anything away from it to say that the characters were very limited, narrow and small. That was part of the point: they had been morally and emotionally stunted by their experience. I keep making the comparison with Jacobean drama, where flawed characters bring disaster on themselves without ever really seeing why; whereas in Shakespeare, for instance, even the most compromised characters have layers and layers of awareness. For me there are other shows from the era of great TV that have more of the richness of the nineteenth-century novel: Breaking Bad, The Americans. Succession was a brilliant exercise in a very constrained premise. But now you've got me on something I've been brooding about! Sorry to go on and on!
This is such a wonderful conversation! I'm so enjoying reading through everyone's notes here. Throwing in a few very lightweight thoughts:
-I appreciated Mona's note on my favorite line from chapter one: "The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it." I found this quite funny on a first read and then devastatingly sad on the second.
-Going into my first chapter of Middlemarch, I'd just finished HBO's Succession, another story in which "intimacy, shame, jealousy and competition" between siblings is very much in the foreground. I've been thinking a lot recently about the similarities and differences between great TV and great novels^. And I'll say -- launching into the world of Middlemarch really took the sting out of coming to the end of Jesse Armstrong's great TV show. As effective as Succession was as a drama, there's something really exciting about inhabiting the world of a novel alongside a great narrator (and hopefully with a group of friends) that I don't think TV can replicate.
^https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/are-the-new-golden-age-tv-shows-the-new-novels.html#:~:text=Television%20is%20not%20the%20new,in%20mind%20the%20novel's%20weirdness.
So with you on Point One! Like, she cannot even imagine an equal relationship with a man as a source of pleasure. And likewise re Succession. I thought Succession was great, but I don't think it takes anything away from it to say that the characters were very limited, narrow and small. That was part of the point: they had been morally and emotionally stunted by their experience. I keep making the comparison with Jacobean drama, where flawed characters bring disaster on themselves without ever really seeing why; whereas in Shakespeare, for instance, even the most compromised characters have layers and layers of awareness. For me there are other shows from the era of great TV that have more of the richness of the nineteenth-century novel: Breaking Bad, The Americans. Succession was a brilliant exercise in a very constrained premise. But now you've got me on something I've been brooding about! Sorry to go on and on!