infinite stfu

[lotesse]

rargh reading Trollope (Can You Forgive Her?) and wanting to wallbang so hard. Is he worth it? should I skim or wikipedia and pretend I finished it? Six hundred more pages of this! I wouldn't mind the boredom so much if he'd stop breaking the fourth wall to lecture me on the silliness of my ideas that my selfhood should be central to my life-choices!

Comments

[schemingreader]

What do you mean by "worth it"? I remember enjoying that book very much, and then finally getting to one of his novels with a strongly anti-Semitic characterization. (I know he wrote a novel against fashionable anti-Semitism, but that didn't stop him dealing in stereotypes himself.) Then I didn't want to read anymore. Do you have to read this book even if you don't like it, for school?

[lotesse]

I have this whole baby Victorianist thing going on, you know, and I'm trying not to be That Scholar, the one who hasn't actually read any of the relevant novels! So I ought to read it, as I ought to read everything - but I will confess that I have let myself out of books before. Too many novels around to work through the ones I really dislike!

What did you like about the book? Hearing what other people loved can often help me fall in love too, if I'm having difficulty in doing so.

[schemingreader]

I did all my Trollope reading before 2005, when I started journaling and writing reviews. I think I must have had the bad experience--it was probably with He Knew He Was Right? I can't remember which book was which! That's a long time ago. I even searched my email, and the only reference I found was in 2005 right before I started journaling to having lost my taste for his books and being ready to give them away. It was one of those things where I was really into him for a few novels and then felt betrayed.

So what did I like? Well, I was into that whole ornate Victorian style. I liked the jokes. I was not put off by the romance, which frankly isn't that different from reading a long slash fan fic. (And I wasn't reading slash at the time, so...I can't say if I have that insight right!)

Do you like other Victorian writers? Mrs Gaskell? I liked her books, even though they were sometimes emotionally over the top. Dickens, whom I so far have never gotten into but some people love? Do you have to like them, or just read them? You could always just read and write spiteful comments in your notes.

[lotesse]

I'm crazy about Victorian novels - hence the professionalization! But I tend to like women's 19th cent. books a great deal better than men's, both for the sexual politics and because I just enjoy them more. Gaskell, Eliot, the Brontës, Austen - but also Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird and Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Mary Shelley! I loathe Dickens, have guarded affection for Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle, and am totally crazy for Oscar Wilde.

And I gotta say, for long/ornate Victorian realism, I'll take Eliot over Trollope any day!

[schemingreader]

Well, I say, read it and critique the hell out of it. Bad dates, bad jobs, bad family events--they're all fodder for stories. Why not bad books? Or even, good books with bad...stuff in them.

[schemingreader]

You know, Anthony Trollope's mom was a novelist too. I've never read her books. It might be interesting to compare them.

[naraht]

I adore Trollope so he's totally worth it from my point of view. Your mileage obviously varies...

[lotesse]

Tell me why? I know such an awful lot of people who do, and I'm not seeing it - but oh would I like to!

[icarus]

No idea. Why are you reading it?

[lotesse]

Graduate school has my identities as a private reader and a dutiful scholar all tangled up - I'm reading it because I ought to have read it, I suppose, but if I could also be reading it because I liked it I'd be happier.

[starlady]

Don't do it! Trollope is an asshat.

[lotesse]

But he's a relevant asshat! It's odd - I'm fine with his characters, but as soon as his narratorial voice comes in I want to spit the novel out instantly.

If you've had bad experiences with him, please do detail them ...

[starlady]

I'm fine with his characters, but as soon as his narratorial voice comes in I want to spit the novel out instantly.

I feel much the same about Tolstoy.

Which Trollope book is it where he goes on about how a woman isn't worth getting involved with if she's already fallen in love with someone at whatever point, because the bloom is off the rose?

[lotesse]

Oh god ugh! I've no idea - I'm just dipping into him for the first time - but I'm not surprised to hear such things reported of him.

[anghraine]

I, um, haven't read any Trollope yet (*shamed*), so I can't be helpful at all, but if you haven't read his mother's stuff it's kind of amazing. In a melodramatic Victorian emofest way.

The moral at the end of my favourite one is "and this is why you shouldn't marry brooding, controlling men you hardly know. BECAUSE THEY ARE ASSHATS." <3

[lotesse]

Oooh ... title?

[anghraine]

"One Fault" -- I think you can find it here: http://books.google.com/ebooks/reader?id=A7ABAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader

[oursin]

I had to read one Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds) as part of the Victorian component of the Englit half of my undergraduate degree, and I have never picked up another one. I am told that he is worth reading, and for decades I have been saving him for my later years, but really, I may not bother. I could reread all of Charlotte Yonge's novels of contemporary life and most of Gissing instead. And Middlemarch several more times.

I reviewed a book on the construction of the Victorian midlife crisis which cited works by F and A Trollope on the remarrying (or wouldbe remarrying) widow, but was not incited to go out and read any of Frances' works. She sounds interesting as a woman; her novels, not so much.

[lotesse]

Am v. glad to hear it's not just me! I have Mona Caird's Daughters of Danaus up next on my list, and I'm itching to be through and done and go back to reading women's work.