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A review by emilyconstance
Middlemarch by George Eliot
5.0
"what do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?"
This is a book I've wanted to read for so long and I'm kicking myself for not having read it sooner. Wow. I would say easily this is one of the best books I've read to date. A true tour de force; everything about it is impressive. Its themes (which I'll get to), its historical accuracy (the amount of research that she put into this book is inspiring), its prophetic aptitude, its world-building, its character-building, its narrative structure...if this had been another book by another author, I think it would be easy to become overwhelmed. I'm really bad at writing and dissecting while I'm reading, so I never did make some sort of character map... but off the top of my head there's just about 20 characters that are shuffled through over the course of nearly 600 pages. You get to know every single one of them. You get to see the inside of each of their lives. You learn something about them - you learn something about yourself through them. More importantly, you learn a lot (or perhaps very little) about *other* characters through them...much like we do in real life. Which is why the structure of the narrative is so impressive. To say on paper that "oh the chapters aren't in chronological order - it jumps around and you hear things about certain events through other characters' conversations before you go back and hear about what happened" sounds...i don't know...like the jumping around would be, for lack of a better word, "harsh"? Like it would be really noticeable and the readers would be confused where they are in time or in the story. But it's so subtle that it's just very true-to-life. The dialogue is so realistic. It doesn't give you obvious details all the time, and sometimes a character will say something that makes you wonder if they're implying X about another character and then you might not even find out until a few chapters from then what the story is.
And that's really why I love this book. I'm just so impressed by how on-the-nose she is about how convinced we are by our grand delusions that are proven time, and time, and time, and time again to be false. We think that we know the ins and outs of people when we really know nothing about them at all - due especially to our failure simply to *inquire* about them. They become an ideal in our minds that we mold to our purpose. We think that we have control over ourselves and consequently the people around us, but in fact it's only in all the ways that we don't perceive that we have any influence over others at all, as we are also influenced by those around us in ways we can't always perceive. Always getting in the way of each other's sought-after "destinies." We are so caught up in our own grand illusions that we can't even visualize a realistic path toward making those illusions a reality; oftentimes not even a first-step. Which is why marriages so often fail; relationships so often crumble...dreams go unachieved.
And that's not even the half of it...this book says so much more about gender, class, politics, religion, social change...I could easily read it again and end up with a completely different takeaway from the one I'm walking away with now. I don't like rereading books...but this is something that I would love to jump back into one day. It becomes a part of you, like your hometown.
This is a book I've wanted to read for so long and I'm kicking myself for not having read it sooner. Wow. I would say easily this is one of the best books I've read to date. A true tour de force; everything about it is impressive. Its themes (which I'll get to), its historical accuracy (the amount of research that she put into this book is inspiring), its prophetic aptitude, its world-building, its character-building, its narrative structure...if this had been another book by another author, I think it would be easy to become overwhelmed. I'm really bad at writing and dissecting while I'm reading, so I never did make some sort of character map... but off the top of my head there's just about 20 characters that are shuffled through over the course of nearly 600 pages. You get to know every single one of them. You get to see the inside of each of their lives. You learn something about them - you learn something about yourself through them. More importantly, you learn a lot (or perhaps very little) about *other* characters through them...much like we do in real life. Which is why the structure of the narrative is so impressive. To say on paper that "oh the chapters aren't in chronological order - it jumps around and you hear things about certain events through other characters' conversations before you go back and hear about what happened" sounds...i don't know...like the jumping around would be, for lack of a better word, "harsh"? Like it would be really noticeable and the readers would be confused where they are in time or in the story. But it's so subtle that it's just very true-to-life. The dialogue is so realistic. It doesn't give you obvious details all the time, and sometimes a character will say something that makes you wonder if they're implying X about another character and then you might not even find out until a few chapters from then what the story is.
And that's really why I love this book. I'm just so impressed by how on-the-nose she is about how convinced we are by our grand delusions that are proven time, and time, and time, and time again to be false. We think that we know the ins and outs of people when we really know nothing about them at all - due especially to our failure simply to *inquire* about them. They become an ideal in our minds that we mold to our purpose. We think that we have control over ourselves and consequently the people around us, but in fact it's only in all the ways that we don't perceive that we have any influence over others at all, as we are also influenced by those around us in ways we can't always perceive. Always getting in the way of each other's sought-after "destinies." We are so caught up in our own grand illusions that we can't even visualize a realistic path toward making those illusions a reality; oftentimes not even a first-step. Which is why marriages so often fail; relationships so often crumble...dreams go unachieved.
And that's not even the half of it...this book says so much more about gender, class, politics, religion, social change...I could easily read it again and end up with a completely different takeaway from the one I'm walking away with now. I don't like rereading books...but this is something that I would love to jump back into one day. It becomes a part of you, like your hometown.