(no subject)

[fajrdrako]

From March 19, 2009: What’s the worst 'best' book you’ve ever read — the one everyone says is so great, but you can’t figure out why?

Easy: Moby Dick. I'd heard great quotes from it on X-Files and Star Trek and it sounded brilliant. So only a few years ago I sat down and read it cover to cover, and haven't been so bored (or frustrated) by a novel since Ivanhoe. But I understand why some people might like Ivanhoe, or, rather, might have done so in the 19th century. Moby Dick? I just didn't get it.

It quotes well, though. Ignorance is the parent of fear.

It was a sharp, cold Christmas.

Comments

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Laurence Olivier played Heathcliffe? Are you making that up? That seems... incredible. I can't imagine any actor less Heathcliffe-like. (Or... very few.)

It's awful. They changed the setting to the 1840s (instead of 1770s-early 1800s), and missed out the next generation entirely, so you don't get the plotline of Heathcliff abusing his wife and the children. More people are fmiliar with the film than with the novel, so they have this love-story plot stuck in their minds, and don't know about the worst. The best adaptations I have seen are a BBC serialisation from 1978, and the Ralph Fiennes/Juliette Binoche film, which kept the multi-generation structure. Ralph Fiennes isn't obvious casting (indeed, there are a few hints in the book that Heathcliff may not be white European at all), but he is very, very chilling and nasty.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I sent fajrdrako a copy on disc. It's got a much longer running time (the 1990 one was only about 90-100 minutes; the 1968 one is more like 140 minutes), so there's more of the book in it, including the narrator, who highlights the purple-prose bits with asterisks that appear on screen!

I thought the 1990s version threw away the wonderful scene when Seth does all his Lawrentian spiel while Flora is sewing. The 1968 version is hilarious.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Rufus was wearing far too many clothes, though, as Seth! He even fastened his shirt and wore a waistcoat! Seth in the book is permanently unbuttoning his shirt. (Peter, despite being fair-haired, was (un)dressed far more appropriately: quite an eye-opener for one of my friends, who was far more used to seeing him in middle-age in comedies!)

[janne-d.livejournal.com]

the narrator, who highlights the purple-prose bits with asterisks that appear on screen!

How brilliant! I did miss the asterisks in the other adaptation, and I don't think they had all the references to The Higher Common Sense either and that was a shame too. It is always better when they can get as much of the book in as possible.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

True. A lot of the percecption is formed by preconception.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Lovely!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I saw the Fiennes/Binoche version, and didn't really like it any more than the others because I don't like the story, but I'm mad over both leads, so watching them was a pleasure - and I thought they did a good job. Still. I'd prefer to have seen them together in some other movie.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

LOL - Seth is fun.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I love the way he starts off as this absurd Lawrentian stereotype and turns out to be just a movie-struck kid!

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

The narrator is Joan Bakewell in voice-over. And you get the on-screen montages of nature burgeoning, flowers blooming, wildlife shagging, & c, whenever she's reading. Considering how long ago it was made, it's far more risqué in places than the 1990s version, but I suspect that's because the 1990s TV movie version was made with an eye to US cinema release. US cinema seems happier with violence than it is with sexual references.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I find Dickens, like Scott, works best in abridged or dramatised versions. Both of them over-write: Dickens, especially, was paid by the word and it shows. Also, frankly, English fiction of that time doesn't hold a candle to French or Russian.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I found the same with the film of The Hireling: from the things I'd read, I had anticipated (dreaded) a sort of Lady Chatterley storyline. Instead, it's darker and more sensitively-done story.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The Russian authors I have read and loved (in translation) are Pushkin and Dostoevsky. The 19th century French authors I have read and loved (both in French and in translation) are Zola and Dumas. But I never got over my early love of Dickens and probably never will.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Sounds good.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

Getting away from "classics", one that comes to mind immediately is "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin. Something about her writing style just leaves me cold. I rarely start a book and don't finish it, but have done so with at least a couple of hers. I just can't get into them.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Interesting - since I love LeGuin's writing style. But there are many popular writers I just can't read. My brain glosses over Andre Norton as if she were writing in another language, and I can't even figure out what's going on. I have no idea why. I gave up trying.

I don't read many of the 'classic' SF authors, though - I find them dull. There are exceptions.

[maisedoat.livejournal.com]

Dickens was not paid by the word, I wish he had been, that way there might have been even more of them to love.

I'd buy his laundry lists, in fact I do, the Pilgrim Edition of his letters, costs anything upto £100 a volume. I save up or buy them shop-soiled and have only 4 more volumes to find.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Dickens was not paid by the word, I wish he had been, that way there might have been even more of them to love.

Yes - I wish!

the Pilgrim Edition of his letters, costs anything upto £100 a volume. I save up or buy them shop-soiled and have only 4 more volumes to find.

Oooh, lucky! I've never even seen those. How wonderful.