Rating: 
Summary: Pseudoreality prevails
Review: "The Good Soldier" is a masterpiece of opacity. All first-person narrators are unreliable, but Dowell is a special case. He is so pathetic, so absolutely determined to stay deceived, so observant while always missing the most important things. But he has such a way with words that I'll listen for as long as he wants to talk, so that for a "modernist" novel "The Good Soldier" actually is quite a page-turner. If you have read piles of good old novels and think you've seen everything, I'll wager that "The Good Soldier" will still impress you. The more you like novels, the more you'll admire Ford's achievement. The level of craftsmanship will become even clearer on a second reading.
Rating:
Summary: Pseudoreality prevails
Review: "The Good Soldier" is a masterpiece of opacity. All first-person narrators are unreliable, but Dowell is a special case. He is so pathetic, so absolutely determined to stay deceived, so observant while always missing the most important things. But he has such a way with words that I'll listen for as long as he wants to talk, so that for a "modernist" novel "The Good Soldier" actually is quite a page-turner. If you have read piles of good old novels and think you've seen everything, I'll wager that "The Good Soldier" will still impress you. The more you like novels, the more you'll admire Ford's achievement. The level of craftsmanship will become even clearer on a second reading.
Rating: 
Summary: great fascination interwoven with a touch of boredom
Review: "The Good Soldier" is a book that you have to fight to get through. But, as it is with many great works of litterature (for most mortals), it pays off to keep at it. Ford Maddox Ford (originally "Hueffer") wrote varily and with much awareness when it comes to form. In what has come to be a typical post-modern element, the reader is taken on a rollercoasterride of scattered chronology. As he tells his stpry, the narrator, Dowell, seems to become slightly aware of the events along with the reader, whom he also often enrols in the story by confronting him directly - telling him that he has to make it up himself. I don`t, personally, find much pleasure in the impressionistic style that the author makes use of. So I will not recommend the book to anyone seeking pure entertainment. However, as a work of historical litterature, or even art, it has great value. And for students (or other interested people) the Norton Critical Editions never fail to guide you professionally through your read. The extra material in this edition is magnificent.
Rating:
Summary: 'How Can We Know What Is True?'
Review: "The Good Soldier" is often said to be the best novel of Ford Madox Ford, although few other works of his are read. Published in 1915, this masterpiece is translated in many languages including Japanese. The Norton Series are well known for the strict and careful text critic, but that of this book is almost extraordinary! The footnotes under almost all the pages of the text (153 pp.), a note on the text (15 pp.), and MDATV (Manuscript Development and Textual Variants: 23 pp.)--which are described with dozens of arcane signs and symbols. What a mania! Also the criticism section amounts to 179 pages, devided into (1) contemporary review (2) on impressionism (3) biographical and critical commentary.As is well known, Ford is an English novelist and journalist of German origin, who is often included in the modernism literature of 1910s and 1920s with Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, V. Woolf, etc. As far as this novel is concerned, the ambiguity of the narrative, which is similar to the incredibility of man's memory, is used effectively, the text distorted aesthetically. This is why this work is occassionally called a cubistic novel. By this technique vivid amoral relationships among the hero narrated and his wife and the narrator and his wife got abstract beauty. The ending is also impressive. I wish Fasbinder had adapted this novel to a film. There are various editions published--Penguin, Oxford, Everyman, Vintage etc--but this is arguably the definitive edition.
Rating:
Summary: A classic novel about an existential hero
Review: Albert Camus wrote The Stranger and it became THE existential novel. I would argue that, one could extrapolate the narrator's persona in The Good Soldier, as both alienated, and a precurser to Camus' existential hero in The Stranger. You will have to finish the entire novel to evaluate whether my argument is reasonable.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Scariest Books You'll Ever Read
Review: Although this has the reputation of an antique, buy it immediately. Stephen King never wrote such a horrifying novel--it's about the savagery and madness than lay behind the thin surface of ordinary, polite society. In it, Ford virtually invented the "unreliable narrator" and raised the question: how do we know what anyone tells us is true? Jim Thompson's psychotic protagonists are unimaginable without this deceptively genteel predecessor.
Rating:
Summary: The Saddest Story
Review: As Ford says, this is the saddest story. It is a wonderfully sad story about Edward, a sentamentalist, and his search for true love which never materializes. It is a sad commentary on the world and how happiness escapes people who are anything but "normal". All the things were present for everyone to be happy but everyone had the wrong thing. A must read.
Rating:
Summary: Is it sad or is it funny?
Review: As you can see from the other reviews of this book, it can be looked upon as a tragically romantic tale. Indeed, Ford intially named the novel "The saddest story". Throughout the years, though, there have always been contenders for the view that it is actually a comical book. Whichever, it is a magnificently constructed novel. A tale of adultery, yes, but far removed from today's soap operas and yet so very contemporary. I read it knowing that some see it as a humorous tale. I was struck by the tragedy of it. It does have its funny turns, but as a whole it is certainly the saddest story. When it comes to telling a story, Ford does what his old buddy Conrad tried to do but never achieved...
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and complex
Review: Don't get caught up in a reading that doesn't get beyond the most shallow interpretation of events and phrasing. This apparently casually written work is a masterpiece of finely thought out detail. While deconstruction can be pointless, taking irony at face value is just as futile. It seems like a book about Leonora and Edward Ashburnham as told by a naive and passive friend, John Dowell. In reality, it is the transformation of John Dowell as he makes sense of his world after shattering information. His entire sense of reality has been undermined by the knowledge that the past 13 years 6 months were established in lies. The structure of the novel is deceptively simple. His retelling of past events masks the fact that the action of telling the story occurs in the present. Dowell tells us he has been writing for 6 months, he goes away for 18 months, returns, and then finishes the last two chapters. The lack of a fixed time frame for the narrated histories of the major characters again blurs time. And then there is the fact that there are several layers of story. There is reality, which we can never know. There is what Dowell believed was reality, of which he gives some description. There are the stories from various points of view that Dowell was told and then digests and retells to us. Then there is the present action of Dowell's changing self. All of these except for the last, are filtered through Dowell's narration. The last is exposed through his narration. In this work we have one of the finest examples of the Impressionist style of writing, as well as the Modern. Dowell is a recovering innocent. His identification with Edward is not absurd or insane, but the yearning of an innocent and a romantic for a perceived ideal that has been destroyed by a world that cannot nourish or understand it. Of course, this is a simplistic and narrow description that doesn't even get into the pre-WWI aspect of the novel and the August 4 controversy. Suffice it to say that the book is incredibly rich and there are no wasted words. Read it, it is worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: A painful narrative of deception and intrigue
Review: Ford has written a clever, painful to read, novel. The narrator describes how he and his wife Florence met another couple they were so compatible with that they spent the next 9 years together. After you are fully convinced that they are all wonderful, you learn that one of them is not at all what he seemed but far more sinister, but that is only from one character's point of view. You then learn It may be that another character is really to blame for the behavior of the first, and so on. As soon as you think you know the characters, they are cast in a new light. At the end, you are not even sure you know the narrator, except that he is shallow and self-deceived. The novel is well written but the characters aren't necessarily believable -- except that you are seeing them through the narrator's eyes and he may be self-deceived.
|
