The French Lieutenant's Woman

Rating:
Summary: Post-modern needn't mean archly stupid
Review: What to make of a Victorian novel by a contemporary existentialist who steps into the book twice and can't decide how to end it? I cannot imagine a more satisfying inconclusive book.

Charles gets the girl. Or maybe not? It doesn't matter. Fowles' novels are always superficially simple and unplumbable in their philosophical depths: *The Collector*, *The Magus*, *The French Lieutenant's Woman*, *A Maggot*.

Sarah Woodruff is at once utterly inexplicable and absolutely believeable. And her believeability extends to the unthinkable. As well as we "understand" her, we cannot choose the "right" ending any more than Fowles can.

Humans are creatures of dizzying Hazard. I once heard Richard Loewentin argue that even if behavior could be "determined" by complete knowledge of motives and stimuli, as the social Darwinists believe, the sheer volume of those motives and causes would allow virtual free will. Even so, no depth of understanding can determine Sarah's behavior, no fount of self-knowledge binds her to any course.

Chance circumstances, trivial as the nail lost from the horse's shoe, trigger the chaotic avalanche of the action after the incredible sex scene. So it is in life; the trivial becomes the deciding element.

I lost a Sarah, as randomly and as much through my own error as Charles did. And I remain as uncertain as he of the magnitude of that loss, however familiar I am with the scale of my grief. What a heartbreaking book, what terrible truths.

Rating:
Summary: The Victorian Era read by the late '60s
Review: When I started reading The French Lt's Woman, i was expecting some very sad, tragic and hard to follow, but what I got is quite the opposite: the book gives you good laughs sometimes and it is very catching. I think that the fact of being written more than a hundrer years later than the time when the story takes place allows the writer to have a critical and ironic inight in his characters and events as well.

Fowles is a master when it comes to go over the XIX century using the XX century approach. From time to time he reminds us that when the book was being written most of the moral of its characters and situations had already changed. On the other hand, we can see that the world hasn't changed at all in many other subjects dealt in the book.

I guess that when the book was first published in the late '60s it caught on, and it is easy to understand, The French... goes with the sixties ideas.

To sum up, it is a book interesting for anyone who enjoys a good writting and wants to see how different ( or similar) we are from the Victorian Era.

Rating:
Summary: The genuine article
Review: Yep, this is it: a true twentieth century masterpiece.

The first time I read this at the age of 16, I stayed up most of the night to finish it, as I had with _The Magus_. I got the heroine mixed up in the personal mythology of my mind with my high school girlfriend, Joni Mitchell, Anais Nin, and all that is eternally mysterious and wonderful about women.

Having read the book three or four more times, I am much better able to appreciate the ideas -- existential, Darwinian, Marxist -- that fit into the web of a rollicking good story. This is a novel that punches the head as unerringly as the heart.

And don't forget the element of PLAY: Fowles has said this novel was written by a man who was very tired of novels and the usual constraints under which they were written. So there are THREE endings: a false, everything-tidied-up-as-it-would-have-been-in-a-true-Victorian-novel ending about two-thirds through the book; and two opposing endings at the finish.

Fowles reportedly even wrote a farcical chapter in the style of Alice in Wonderland in which the narrator chases after the hero with an axe ... but his wife and other advisors made him leave it out. I hope we will someday get to see that one.

Why did the latest publisher put a cute blonde on the cover! (I'm assuming she is NOT meant to depict the secondary love interest, Charles's fiancee.) This is almost as bad an aesthetic decision as casting Meryl Streep in the movie version, though she made an admirable attempt to be Sarah. Try to get a copy with the original cover art -- a choppy woodcut of a brunette with a distant gaze -- and that will get you launched into the story in the right mood.