Phedippides

Wonderful Writer Boring Story

Revisado: 07-11-23

No finer Victorian writer, but this is an easily forgettable tale. Characters are stereotypical types, plot has its highs and lows, interruptions by sanctimonious narrator. You will likely find no character lovable, even likable. Eliot spent her life challenging gender roles, and here loses connection with both sexes. Adam a hunk, Hetty a floozy, Dinah a Bible thumper. Eliot is neither entertaining, nor enlightening.

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Dickens at his best!

Revisado: 03-29-23

Richard Armitage is a reader without parallel, I will never forget his interpretations of many characters, Bravo!
I admire but do not love Dickens, Dickens creates singular characters too grotesque. Protagonists survive, tolerate, moving forward like Alice in Wonderland. Life that dramatic is a burden, one waits to end.
Copperfield is a tour de force, exhausting to read. Armitage reads it beautifully, operatically, but thankfully now over.
There are many other long books that one could read forever, to me Copperfield is not.

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Good for Quatrocento Firenze, but not a good story.

Revisado: 11-14-22

Too preachy, Characters and story are creative but unreal. Use of historic events and people interwoven with the great literary style of Eliot, but a bridge too far.

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Lesser known Trollope novel is very good

Revisado: 11-21-20

Reading Trollope’s best novels is joining the lives of his characters until you have to let them go at the end. This ranks as very good. Ayala acknowledges her perversity/stubborn romantic notions to the confounding of the more practical/realistic people in her life. Blessed with several heroes, two uncles, one a wealthy arriviste with a generous heart, another who has little but generous with his humble home; the Angel, Jonathan Stubbs who marries her. Ayala is a timeless young beauty intent upon a fairytale.

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One of Trollope’s Best

Revisado: 01-11-18

For a single large Trollope novel the characters become part of your life over time. Almost sorry to end the story.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

For Serious Literature Aficionados Only

Revisado: 12-25-16

If you prefer reading serious authors, Modiano is a worthy choice. My guess is this book is not his best. You should be familiar with existential writers like Camus, post-modern like Pynchon and DeLillo; Classics like Proust, Mann, Joyce - to enjoy Modiano.
This is a humorless tale like Oryx and Crake, the Plague, Death in Venice. Set in Paris and surrounding villages a man without family, friends, or a personal life keeps his few memories locked in a virtual and real closet. The telling of the tale is either by happenstance, coincidence, or design - perhaps the readers choice to discern. C'est la vie!

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Truly a Great Course

Revisado: 12-09-16

Many Great Courses have teachers who "talk down " as if they are teaching undergraduates. That is of course what professors do, teach young people. Nice to have this extremely knowledgeable man speak as a peer. Great teacher. Great course, Bravo!

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esto le resultó útil a 11 personas

Great Trollope

Revisado: 01-20-15

Eighty chapters leave you wanting more. So many unforgettable characters. Many fascinating females and a few men. Cheers to you

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Disturbing, exotic, wondrous

Revisado: 11-17-13

If you could sum up The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in three words, what would they be?

Unforgetable wondrous life

What did you like best about this story?

Diaz has created one of the great characters of literature, everyman of pain, unrequited desire, in a most imperfect world. The reader will never forget Oscar, his Dominican world , an American,first generation living a wonderous life. Most grand struggling family, extended family, friends, close and not, wandering through modern bleak exurbia, all born from the inhuman Dominican regime of the Trujillo monster. A story exotic to most Americans, but if your heritage has historic stories of atrocities and inhumanity, and if you can imagine a first American-born generation in their own family, you will love and never forget Oscar.

What about Jonathan Davis and Staci Snell ’s performance did you like?

just great, the horrors of Trujillo, the family members, like listening to a cast of dozens. Oscar and others are among the great literary characters of all time.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

An American hero.

Any additional comments?

It takes some patience to get through the Dominican Spanish dialogue and commentary throughout, but it is all worth it.

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