Bleak House
I know this may seem strange for an English student to admit but I have never liked Dickens. I never had any interest in reading Dickens, watching adaptations of Dickens books, any of it. They always struck me as so depressing and melancholy, why he would use so many pages to describe the duller things of life, such as 'fog,' was beyond me and it puzzled my futher why people would choose to spend time reading so many pages about fog. When Bleak House neatly arranged itself right in the middle of my compulsory reading list for the year I was less than impressed and have put off reading this 900page monster for as long as I possibly can. The thing is, since embarking on this mammoth task I have come to realize it isn't even nearly as daunting as I had anticipated. Bleak House is such an amazing book! The descriptions of fog etc are quite astoundingly lengthy and yet totally enthralling and rich in purpose within the context of the novel. The characters have some depth. The intertwining tales are captivating, there is suspense, mystery, drama and love and it's packed full of intriguing social commentary. We'll see if my admiration is quite so high when I get to the end of the 900 pages but so far I am pleasantly surprised and finding I am having to eat my words on Dickens. At the same time though, as impressive as it is as an art form I just can not bring myself to deem literature worthy (or unworthy) of such extensive analysis and dissection. I really struggle to understand how people dedicate their lives to forming fantastic arguments about how Bleak House fits aristotles formula of what constitutes a detective story or in what ways it can be seen as modernist according to who. I just can't make myself get excited about these things or really see the relevance of it.
2 comments:
There is a BBC (i think it's BBC) drama on every Sunday night at the moment here in Toronto, of Dicken's "Bleak house". My Mum and sister have been following it weekly, and were telling me about it just yesterday, funny you should mention it as well, as its not usually something brought up in everyday conversation! So if the reading gets to tedious, go rent the movie....but glad you are plugging through. And you've gotta love Oliver Twist right?!?!
I did see that actually, my Mumtaped it for me over Christmas, it was really well done although there were a few things changed, in the real one Ester goes Blind and there are some characters not in the book that are in the film (good to realise that before my seminar!!!)
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