Rating: 
Summary: James' finest, in my opinion...
Review: How does one choose between Henry James novels? Can one really put the feminine insight of The Portrait of a Lady above the moral conflict of The Wings of the Dove? I loved both those novels, and thought that The Ambassadors was quite good as well. But The Golden Bowl, for me, was another experience altogether. First of all, I found "Bowl" to be the most difficult of James' novels to read. Actually, it was one of the most difficult books I have ever read, period. One must reread many passages to make sure they have the right meaning because the prose is so austere and almost impenetrable. But, once you get to the conclusion, it's more than worth it. You have to stick with this novel right to the end in order to fully appreciate its brilliance. The characters are realized with an intelligence that is rare to find in literature today, and they are written about in such a wonderfully restrained and subtle way. Don't miss this literary triumph, and please don't shy away from it because it is considered a "classic" or because of your possible misconceptions of Henry James. Also, I read that it is being developed for an upcoming film version by Merchant Ivory. If that's true, then moviegoers are in for a treat!
Rating:
Summary: A Miracle of
Review: I have read James' "Golden Bowl" no less than four times, and each perusal brings with it a fuller appreciation of the author's genius! There are very few novels that offer the enormous challenges of this one. James' prose and syntax require a great deal of patience and concentration, but they eventually yield to the determined reader!
Rating: 
Summary: Pompous and verbose
Review: I just spent two weeks reading this book thinking that at some point there would be a hook or a payoff. There was none. James took 787 pages to tell a story that never develops into anything in terms of action, and only an ambiguous wishy-washiness in terms of the characters' subjective states. Yes, in some passages the writing was elegant and enchanting, but not enough to save the book. And no, I'm not ragging on this book simply because I didn't understand it. I did understand it. I'm ragging on it because it was a waste of my time. I'm giving it 3 stars because James is obviously a master of the English language, but this book is essentially for English professors. Read Edith Wharton instead if you're into this period and subject matter.
Rating:
Summary: A massive headache
Review: Like all the rest of James' works The Golden Bowl gave me a massve headache. Amidst all the adjectives and adverbs James tells an interesting story where all the characters act 'splendidly' toward each other. In this case deceit and infedelity are at the core. Hemmingway could have written this in 100 pages or less. James just makes your head spin.
Rating:
Summary: DON'T LOOK FOR THE CRACK, LOOK FOR THE GOLD IN JAMES
Review: THE GOLDEN BOWL is one among many of James's novels or stories that depict flaws in the human character. The plot is secondary - merely a vehicle to reveal those flaws. And as in some of his other stories, the persons depicted are European and American. The setting is abroad, in Europe, and the American(s) is (are) visiting the Europeans. In THE GOLDEN BOWL,(chapter 6) the description of the bowl itself is a good example of James's facility with words, seemingly pedantic, but, on close examination, vividly descriptive, not just in physical terms, but more in the psychological. The golden bowl portends an uncertain relationship in the pending marriage of Prince Amerigo and Maggie. It appears to be perfect but Amerigo has seen the crack in it. If you are a reader seeking action, exciting plots or a fast read, forget about Henry James. James is a master of verbal, human portraits. His style is Victorian. Yes, he seems verbose, but his words mean something and leave you thinking. You must work through the nuances, metaphors and intellectual verbiage. And once you do, you will surely feel rewarded.
Rating: 
Summary: All commas--No action
Review: The language in this "novel" is so pretentious and convoluted as to be largely unreadable by the average reader. It seems that James never met a comma he didn't like, and uses them to imbed all sorts or modifiers and asides. Although the graduate students may attach some deeper meaning to this, I suspect he really didn't have a clear idea of anything he wanted to say so he simply rambled on. At least with Faulkner there is a payoff. With James, all the language covolutions lead to nothing in the way of action. Random House must have had a large,unsold inventory of this book ( not surprising) so they included it in their top 100 list. James has single-handedly ruined my project of reading the all of the top 100. I will not, cannot, albeit I would like to, read,with any pleasure, the other two James books, novels perhaps, on the list, the Random House list that is.
Rating: 
Summary: Ultimate Henry James: Hard to Read But You Will Be Rewarded
Review: The last completed novel by Henry James is, like preceding works of his later era ("The Wings of the Dove" comes up to mind first), very hard to read. That's the warning to every unwary reader who happens to think about starting to read Henry James anew.
The plot is simple: its about two couples of people -- Charlotte and Amerigo, and Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie Verver. Charlotte loves Amerigo, who, however, decides to marry Maggie. Soon after that, Charlotte marries Adam Verver, an American millionaire. Still, Amerigo and Charlotte maintain their former relations as lovers until their secret is discovered by Maggie unexpectedly with an advent of a golden bowl, which looks perfect outward, but deep inside cracked. Maggie, who greatly adores her deceived father, in turn, starts to move in order to mend the cracked relations, or secure the apparently happy family life without disturbing the present relations. As this sketch of the story tells you, one of the favorite topics of the 19th century literature -- adultery -- is staged in the center of the book, but the way James handles it is very different from those of other American or British writers. The meaning is hidden in a web of complicated, even contorted sentences of James, and you have to read often repeatedly to grasp the syntax. The grammar is sometimes unclear, with his frequent use of pronouns and double negatives, and very often you just have to take time to understand to what person James' "he" or "she" really refers to. It is not a rare thing for you to find that a paragraph starts with those "he" and "she" without any hint about its identity, so you just read on until you hit the right meaning of these pronouns. And this is just one example of the hard-to-chew James prose. If you think it is pompous, you surely are excused. But as you read on again, you find, behind this entangled sentences and a rather banal melodramatic story, something intelligent, something about humans that lurks in the dark part of our heart. I will not pretend that I can understand all of the book, but James clearly shows how we, with a limited ability of our perception, try to act as the characters of the book do, in the given atomosphere of society. To me, this book is about the way of the people's behavior luminously recorded; about the way of our expressing and perceiving ourselves without uttering them aloud. Gore Vidal says about the book: "James's conversational style was endlessly complex, humourous, unexpected -- euphemistic where most people are direct, and suddenly precise where avoidance or ellipsis is usual (see his introduction of "The Golden Bowl" in Penguin Classics edition. This is exactly the nature of this book, which would either attract or repel you. Unfortunately, I admit, this is not my cup of tea, for I prefer more story-oriented novels. Still, if you really want to challenge reading something really substantial, I for one recommend this book. There is a sumptuous film version of the book, starring Uma Thurman and Nick Nolte. It might be a good idea to watch it before you start reading the book.
Rating:
Summary: Ultimate Henry James: Hard to Read But You Will Be Rewarded
Review: The last completed novel by Henry James is, like preceding works of his later era ("The Wings of the Dove" comes up to mind first), very hard to read. That's the warning to every unwary reader who happens to think about starting to read Henry James anew.
The plot is simple: its about two couples of people -- Charlotte and Amerigo, and Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie Verver. Charlotte loves Amerigo, who, however, decides to marry Maggie. Soon after that, Charlotte marries Adam Verver, an American millionaire. Still, Amerigo and Charlotte maintain their former relations as lovers until their secret is discovered by Maggie unexpectedly with an advent of a golden bowl, which looks perfect outward, but deep inside cracked. Maggie, who greatly adores her deceived father, in turn, starts to move in order to mend the cracked relations, or secure the apparently happy family life without disturbing the present relations. As this sketch of the story tells you, one of the favorite topics of the 19th century literature -- adultery -- is staged in the center of the book, but the way James handles it is very different from those of other American or British writers. The meaning is hidden in a web of complicated, even contorted sentences of James, and you have to read often repeatedly to grasp the syntax. The grammar is sometimes unclear, with his frequent use of pronouns and double negatives, and very often you just have to take time to understand to what person James' "he" or "she" really refers to. It is not a rare thing for you to find that a paragraph starts with those "he" and "she" without any hint about its identity, so you just read on until you hit the right meaning of these pronouns. And this is just one example of the hard-to-chew James prose. If you think it is pompous, you surely are excused. But as you read on again, you find, behind this entangled sentences and a rather banal melodramatic story, something intelligent, something about humans that lurks in the dark part of our heart. I will not pretend that I can understand all of the book, but James clearly shows how we, with a limited ability of our perception, try to act as the characters of the book do, in the given atomosphere of society. To me, this book is about the way of the people's behavior luminously recorded; about the way of our expressing and perceiving ourselves without uttering them aloud. Gore Vidal says about the book: "James's conversational style was endlessly complex, humourous, unexpected -- euphemistic where most people are direct, and suddenly precise where avoidance or ellipsis is usual (see his introduction of "The Golden Bowl" in Penguin Classics edition. This is exactly the nature of this book, which would either attract or repel you. Unfortunately, I admit, this is not my cup of tea, for I prefer more story-oriented novels. Still, if you really want to challenge reading something really substantial, I for one recommend this book. There is a sumptuous film version of the book, starring Uma Thurman and Nick Nolte. It might be a good idea to watch it before you start reading the book.
Rating:
Summary: 'You propose to me beautiful things'
Review: The words of Charlotte Stant above, as she ponders the offer of Maggie Verver's father as he courts her, echo throughout the book and after. The last of his triptych opening the American century, it recognizes the ascension of America on the world scene. 'The heirs of all the ages', Adam Verver and his too-adoring daughter Maggie, are casually ravishing the Old World of its treasures, one of which simply happens to be a near-destitute Italian prince of the highest and most scandalous lineage, and who is also the ex-lover of Maggie's destitute school friend, Charlotte. Though Prince Amerigo begins the novel by musing that the sense of Empire is better found by the Thames than the Tiber, he's contracting a marriage to the newer empire across the waves by marrying Maggie, or her fortune, or her father, or the future -- he's never quite certain which is his actual spouse as the book unfolds. Often considered a stranger to passion, James conveys immense passion simply through the almost geometric play of the characters. The Prince permits himself to be persuaded by Charlotte that concealing their prior affair, terminated from mutual poverty, is altruistic in the American style; Maggie, overwhelmed with American guilt at her father's solitude following her marriage, finds Charlotte mysteriously available as a potential companion and spouse for her father; and out of mutual fear of making the other feel guilty, father and daughter devote themselves exclusively to each other's happiness, and the Prince and Charlotte, enjoying publicity and celebrity in high society, resume their affair in the name of assuring the happiness of Maggie and Adam. No one is supposedly acting from selfish, much less material motives, and yet the whole movement of desire is dependent wholly on the American magnate's obliviousness to human passion and suffering, even his daughter's. The story appears to be a comedy of manners, is told as such, with witty one-upmanship neatly compressed with astute analysis, particularly from the ironic transatlantic observer, Fanny Assingham, who worked to arrange Maggie's marriage and who likewise keeps Maggie ignorant in the name of preserving her innocence.
James survives into the 21st century for cleaving to the limits of the eye and what the eye sees, and for refusing himself the luxury of labeling the emotions or experiences his 'personnages' undergo; the brush strokes of perception stay bright. The smooth surface of mutual consideration between the six characters lacquers over the multiple emotional incest, voyeurism and sadism which they refer to with jesting historical metaphors, to monstrous ancestors, to piracy, to bablyonian sensual appetites, as they dissociate themselves from naming or consciously envisioning their fierce desires. Given all this, the book could be claustrophobic, but there are only, truly, four characters, and James, ever on the side of freedom, animates the whole with Maggie's breadth of spirit, her American imagination of an innocence that survives the death of self-deceptions, which sweeps through the book, and which is there no matter how many times the reader comes back to the endlessly seductive company of this quartet.
Rating:
Summary: not for everybody
Review: There are at least two movie adaptations of James's "The Golden Bowl" that I'm aware of: a recent one (2000) with Nick Nolte and Uma Thurman (generally regarded as tiresome), and a colossally inept and nauseating BBC version from, I think, 1972. Both are wearisome, and, indeed, it is hard to see how ANY screen version could succeed: the story James has to tell is internal, psychological, and verbal; not external, visual, and action-filled. So any director who takes this material in hand will definitely have the cards stacked against him.
Er, so lemme talk about the book itself . . .
Other reviewers have complained about James's involved, ornate prose: I would definitely sympathize. Certainly, you can't have ADD if you want to tackle this book: there are hundreds of pages at a time consisting of what seems like mere wordage, without much happening.
In defense of this, I can only say that the elegance of the prose itself evokes the elegance of James's world, yet there is something sinister lurking underneath the prose; in the same way that, I submit, James is suggesting that something sinister is lurking under the superficialities of this high-hushed world. All this, of course, is symbolized by the elegant bowl itself, with its subsurface but fatal crack.
Having said that, I do think that the book is somewhat overrated. It's difficult for me, at least, to see what I have in common with or why I should care about a group of hideously rich snobs that have lived on the earth for decades without doing much good for anybody. And it's not just that: after hundreds of pages of James's dizzying verbiage, one begins to wonder if the author, despite his being able to write like an angel, had, in fact, anything at all to say. Certainly when compared to that of his peers (Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville -- or even Dickens) James's oeuvre -- this especially -- seems a little anemic in the "interest of subject matter" and "what he's trying to say" columns.
On the other hand, the world evoked in the book, not to mention the (verbose) manner of its evocation, is dead, dead, dead to us. That is, both the language of the book and its world come from a time that has passed from the earth utterly.
For example: the specter of adultery hangs over the novel, everything the characters think and say, in a way that is difficult to take seriously these days. Same with divorce, something which was, to these people, abhorrent and unthinkable. In the age of drive-thru wedding (and divorce) services, it's an uphill battle taking these characters' problems as seriously as they take them.
To conclude: if you're the kind of person who would be attracted to (and able to finish) this sort of book, if you have what it takes to get into this vanished world . . . well, you certainly don't need my help or encouragement.
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