Fingersmith

Rating:
Summary: Almost a pearl
Review: What to say... It's the most grueling reading experience I've ever had. Seems like one picks up the book and invisible shackles bound you to it until you reach the long awaited last page. I'm not kidding. Yes, it's delicious in narration and socio-historical context but the story... it's so overly dramatic... I read and read until a lot of people got even mad. Only to find that the story, not the research, not the Victorian narrative, not the invocation of Charles Dickens, the story, the base -would be as queerly convoluted as a soap opera of today. Sometimes even erratic, leaving one thinking, that's not a probable reaction/development albeit one can clearly see the benefit it pays to the author's schemes.
The problem with that is that a good story should make us forget that it is a ventriloquism show what we paid to read... (figure of speech). That's paramount, not the tiresome formulaic aproaches to build up expectations in the reader. The end is most unsatisfying considering all this author puts us through.
However, kudos to her for writing it and putting out there something much more enjoying than the horrible typical mainstream lesbian fiction of today.

Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: Really excellent read...told in the true Victorian style with a penchant for descriptions and a strong ability to conjure up a scene and create memorable characters.

Try it as well as Tipping the Velvet...

Rating:
Summary: A novel with many layers
Review: In the reading life of an avid reader there are only few treats like reaching the very big twist in Sarah Waters's "Fingersmith". Not many things are comparable to the big gasp that even an experienced reader will utter when he/she read that paragraph, and in disbelief wants to move on.

Waters' extraordinary novel is made of that, of a big hanging twist after another -- and we are desperate for more. When the narrative flows in a calm pace we cannot almost believe that `nothing is going on'. Actually a lot is going on all the time, but we keep waiting for a huge twist happen. And they happen --oh, boy!

The story of two crossed orphans is told with sophistication and passion. There is more passion from the author towards her creations than from one character to each other. The characters are never what they seem to be --and, no matter how experienced we are, we are delightfully fooled most of the time.

Victorian par excellence, "Fingersmith" can be compared to the also beautiful "The Crimson Petal and the White". Both are very plot-driven big bravura of novels. Waters's work may not be as big as "Petal" but it is still an important social panorama of a period in England --the time when women used to `farm' babies for whatever they were required, a time when pickpockets were called fingersmith, among other things.

But Waters is usually compared to Charles Dickens. It is undeniable that there is a Dickensian element in her novel -- it is not by chance that in the very first page of "Fingersmith" the main character goes to theater to see "Oliver Twist". But while in Dickens' novels characters could be divided into the good, the bad and the very very evil, in Waters's book they cannot labelled at all. Nobody is only good or only bad --they are closer to real human beings, in whom both good and evil cohabit and eventually one of them will come to the surface.

At some point, "Fingersmith" is very close to the gothic novel. Waters has an incredible ability to describe phantasmagoric places without even mentioning ghosts. She creates alive human beings that are much more scarier than any dead soul --just check the beginning of the third part.

But there is also room for existentialism in "Fingersmith". At some point, the narrative would raise interesting questions on the sanity issue. What's a mad person? How can we label someone crazy? There probably is some resonance from Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre". And the philosophical discussion never stops. The most important thematic in "Fingersmith" is the identity: what defines who you are? This is a topic that will always be timeless.

All in all, this is a novel with so many good influences and references that only enhances the pleasure of reading it. There are so many layers in Waters's "Fingersmith" that it is a delightful game to try and predict what will come next --but, mind you, nobody has a creative mind as this author.

Rating:
Summary: Great book until the end...
Review: I read and enjoyed "Tipping the Velvet," and appreciate the time frame in which Sarah Waters writes. Yet in both "Fingersmith" and "Tipping the Velvet," she does not seem to know how to end her stories. She weaves a tapestry of intrigue in both books, then suddenly seems to realize, "uh-oh, I'm on page 500-something, better tie up some lose knots here." The blinding speed with which we discover what happens to each character in Fingersmith felt, to me, like sitting down to a gourmet meal and consuming it without chewing. Overall, I enjoy her writing, and we are never left wondering. But I do look forward to reading an ending that is written at the level of the rest of her skills.