The Return Of The Native

Rating:
Summary: To hear Hardy's words it's a treat
Review: I buy yet another copy of Hardy's 'The Return of the Native'. A brand new version added to my collection. What a treat it is to actually hear Hardy's words! I must say I already own many copies some more musty than others, many autographed by faceless faded students. It is the thought, the abstract longing for love and happiness, and not the actual possesion and enjoyment of them that actually makes us divine. The beauty of sadness. In Hardy's triumph 'The Return of the Native' a fathomless doomed romanticism shines with a vast and ecclectic frame. Glory and truth spread thinly in a dark canvas. Some have asked why is Hardy so preocupied with tragedy. The sane answer would be: look up Aeschyles and Sophocles. To me, The Return of the Native, a very favorite book, is a delicious witch's brew. Clym Yeobright returns from Paris to Egdon Heath (Cornwall) disappointed to open a school for the poor, but alas enters a fatal liaison with a local, Eustacia Vye. Like Madame Bovary this character is drawn with such originality and depth, that it's awesome. In the famous chapter where Eustacia Vye is so valiantly exposed, "Queen of Night'I find the most perfect prose. An elegy of such soulful and poetic splendor, so whimsical yet so telling. Never had an author rendered a dire mysterious character, so bare. For those critics whom over decades have banned this clear chapter as affected and ponderous I say they lack something in their brains and hearts. Read or listen to Hardy's 'The Return of the Native'or 'Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary' if you want to encounter two of the most fascinating leading ladies in all of classical literature. Comparable, a poem by Theophile Gautier or the equally tragic 'La dame aux camelias' by Alexander Dumas fils,enjoy, along with this, Thomas Hardy's superb and foremost literary masterpiece. Mise en scene that are brilliant, though only ominous fragments of an amorous, dark and wicked tableaux. A hurting sexual chiaroscuro condemmed from the start by fate, and by the intensity of the raw, pounding emotions. An ecclipsed moonlit play driven downwards inexorably by an exquisite but flawed heroine. I counted them, I now own 26 copies of 'The Return of the Native'!