Argiento
02-28-2017, 05:32 AM
Hi, my first post here. I had written a much longer post on a different forum, which I can't find right now to copy/paste, but not receiving replies I decided to join here and hopefully get some response. But basically I recently finished reading this book, and found the book to be sort of all over the place, and very lacking for a book that I was told was mainly on guilt and influenced by Victorian literature.
I had expected it to be a sort of a deeply psychological character study. But instead as soon as I felt like I knew where the narrative was headed, things changed. I could not tell what the book was trying to do, as if it wanted to cover so many things and yet not cover them, a sort of closeness then distance, playing with emotions. Like at first you think it's about the woman and her daughter and being shamed in a Puritan society, then then it becomes about the husband's revenge...but no it's about the minister...or is it? We go in and out of couple of characters' psyche and change locations, quite unpredictably. From the very long but seemingly unnecessary introduction to the story, the Custom-House, to what seemed to be at one point a character study, then study of shame and the Puritan society, then a mystery,, then revenge, then guilt, then a romance, then sort of a supernatural kind of story with Pearl being the center of it, to eventually what seemed like not a study of people but of symbols only.
Am I alone in feeling this confusion or did others who read the book felt the story frustrated them over and over? In fact, I almost get the sense that the writer, whether he meant it or not, was preoccupied with the storywriting itself more than with any particular character, which as a result created a forced distancing effect for the reader, drawing you in then pushing you out and changing the game, so you're reminded it's a story. I remember in one part about Pearl in the jungle he goes on to talk about the effect she has on the various animals but then says "it is said", in a way to tell us that he does not know either, and seeing how he the author has been our guide, it has a disorienting effect when he does it, so clearly there, and more indirectly elsewhere. It's subtle stuff of course, not like someone writing absurdist comedy or something and trying to turn everything tradition on its head. But there is something...and that's what I'm trying to figure out, something that made me quite frustrated in reading the book and I wanted to get feedback. Thanks.
EDIT: I saw the option about including tags for title/author too late to enter, and editing won't give me those options again.
I had expected it to be a sort of a deeply psychological character study. But instead as soon as I felt like I knew where the narrative was headed, things changed. I could not tell what the book was trying to do, as if it wanted to cover so many things and yet not cover them, a sort of closeness then distance, playing with emotions. Like at first you think it's about the woman and her daughter and being shamed in a Puritan society, then then it becomes about the husband's revenge...but no it's about the minister...or is it? We go in and out of couple of characters' psyche and change locations, quite unpredictably. From the very long but seemingly unnecessary introduction to the story, the Custom-House, to what seemed to be at one point a character study, then study of shame and the Puritan society, then a mystery,, then revenge, then guilt, then a romance, then sort of a supernatural kind of story with Pearl being the center of it, to eventually what seemed like not a study of people but of symbols only.
Am I alone in feeling this confusion or did others who read the book felt the story frustrated them over and over? In fact, I almost get the sense that the writer, whether he meant it or not, was preoccupied with the storywriting itself more than with any particular character, which as a result created a forced distancing effect for the reader, drawing you in then pushing you out and changing the game, so you're reminded it's a story. I remember in one part about Pearl in the jungle he goes on to talk about the effect she has on the various animals but then says "it is said", in a way to tell us that he does not know either, and seeing how he the author has been our guide, it has a disorienting effect when he does it, so clearly there, and more indirectly elsewhere. It's subtle stuff of course, not like someone writing absurdist comedy or something and trying to turn everything tradition on its head. But there is something...and that's what I'm trying to figure out, something that made me quite frustrated in reading the book and I wanted to get feedback. Thanks.
EDIT: I saw the option about including tags for title/author too late to enter, and editing won't give me those options again.