Customer Reviews

Bridges of Madison County (PDF)

5 star:		(143)
4 star:		(60)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(151)

 

 

If you're a miserable cynic, you'll hate it. I am not a fiction reader. I am purely a lover of non-fiction. But a friend pleaded with me to read this book. When I finally broke down and picked up the book, I could not put it down. I finished it in about 5 hours.

People can say whatever they want about it being contrived romance, but this book puts you inside of what it feels like to be in a very intense romance that some (real) people really experience. I've been there, I know the anguish and intensity of the love this book describes. There really are people who love, speak and act this way.

People who don't get this book are bitter and angry that they can not concieve of such intense loving and living. If you love to love, and love an incredible quick read, this book is for you.

I wept for a good half hour when I finished this book despite myself. Enjoy!

-- A non-fiction loving, non-sap from New Jersey

Robert J Waller botched his opportunity to make "The Bridges of Madison County" an interesting novel. The book contains fascinating themes of conflict including the struggle of choosing between passion and loyalty, and the difficulty of coming to terms with a mother's secret love affair. Unfortunately, rather than exploring these themes, Waller makes them the vehicle for a cardboard love story.

The hero, Robert Kinkaid might have been believable if Waller had endowed him with human qualities. Instead, Waller portrays him as a middle-aged superman: lover, artist, pacifist yet war hero, impoverished, yet glamorous, lovable but unavailable. His discourse is sometimes witty and often cheesy, but never quite believable. I know that Waller wanted to make Kinkaid engaging and appealing, but the resulting character is a two dimensional fantasy.

The Heroine Francesca is a bit more believable when she expresses her erotic feelings for Kinkaid and works through the dilemma over whether to run away with him or to dutifully remain with her husband. Unfortunately, Waller renders her character meaningless with vapid remarks about how Kinkaid should go on without her because she'll only cramp his style. The condescending manner in which she posthumously explains her love affair to her children comes across as artificial, and insulting.

I think the film version of "Bridges of Madison County" starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep succeeds where the book fails. Contrary to the book, Francesca angrily accuses Kinkaid of being selfish and egotistical-a flaw which he admits. Her objection and his subsequent admission provide the relationship with more dramatic tension and make it more believable. The fact that Kinkaid has his flaws makes him more believable and more appealing. Instead of being insipid characters that introduce the story, Francesca's children experience emotional conflict and character development of their own. The revelation of their mother's infidelity comes when each of them is experiencing a crisis in their lives. At first, the shock and shame of their mother's affair adds to their troubles. But slowly they come to terms with her affair and subsequently derive the courage and inspiration from it needed to repair their own lives.

I might not have given "Bridges of Madison County" a second thought and certainly would not have wasted time reviewing it if the film version had not revealed its failed potential to be a decent novel.

I could not even finish reading the last 20 pages of this book because of the offensive content. This book is a glorified romance novel; hiding behind pretentious, contrived, Hemingway-esque descriptive passages: "With her face buried in his neck and her skin against his, she could smell rivers and woodsmoke, could hear steaming trains chuffing out of winter stations in long-ago nightimes, could see travelers in black robes moving steadily along frozen rivers and through summer meadows, beating their way toward the end of things. The leopard swept over her again, and again and yet again, like a long prairie wind, and rolling beneath him, she rode on that wind like some temple virgin toward the sweet, compliant fires marking the soft curve of oblivion." Drivel! I have read so many books of this nature lately and it is increasingly offensive to me that storylines dealing with the romanticism of marital infidelity become best sellers. It's the same old story of the poor, neglected, lonely mother/housewife who is trapped in a boring marriage to your average hard-working "good-Joe" type husband. Who could blame this poor woman for giving into temptation when this exciting, good looking, worldly man comes into her life and makes her feel beautiful, intelligent and desirable again? After 24 hours they are in the sack and after four days of lust, they both know they have finally found their soulmate! Give me a break! The final insult is that the reader is supposed to respect her for choosing her family over "true" love, out of guilt and responsibility? The truly touching love stories are those that are based upon two people who have committed themselves completely to one another, standing together through the good and bad times, the exciting and boring times; raising children and making a life together. All of these "ordinary" moments combined over a lifetime, create a shared history, a friendship, a partnership, a romance. Now, that's a love story.

A woman I know, along with an Amazon.com reviewer or two, couldn't comprehend how Francesca's boredom could lead her to betray her husband. Francesca was not bored, perhaps unsustained by her husband's lack of passion, but not bored. Bridges of Madison County hit the bestsellers list for years because just about everyone has parted ways with someone they loved, whether it lasted four days or ten years. True passion lives forever in the memory and can sustain for a lifetime. This story is beautiful, one of my favorites.

Painful prose. I heard the author wrote this either tongue-in-cheek (which shows) or, after repeatedly failing to get published, decided to resort to writing a romance novel with contempt. As I suffered thru it I pictured him writing it figuring, "If this is what the public wants, dammit, I can spew this drivel like the best of them." I also recall hearing it took him only a few days to churn it out. Shame on him.

...is that Waller's day job is a professor of marketing. Doesn't that just say it all? Upon finishing this book, I thought, "Who wrote this? A committee in conjunction with a focus group?" Then I read Waller's bio on the back cover. Yup, I was right. This book is nothing but a horny professor's wet dream. I mean, come on, what's with the line about being a peregrine? If some guy showed up in my front yard and said that, I'd direct him to the local police department. If you want romance, try marrying someone you REALLY love. Passion and tenderness do exist within legitimate relationships. Now THAT'S a storyline!

This exemplar of bad prose is about a Marlboro Man photographer and the woman he beautifies through his great art. He's sensitive, she's needy, and he is a demon in her cold bed.

As for the prose, how's this for awful: "If you took me in your arms and carried me to your truck and forced me to go with you, I wouldn't murmur a complaint. You could do the same thing just by talking to me. But I don't think you will. You're too sensitive, too aware of my feelings, for that. . . . My life . . . lacks romance, eroticism, dancing in the kitchen to candlelight, and the wonderful feel of a man who knows how to love a woman. . . ."

The wonderful feel of a man who knows how to love a woman? Is it not already obvious why this is bad? The entire phenomena of this book and its enormous popularity tells us that we, as a reading populace, are in love with what's bad. Apparently, what we love is talk that doesn't sound like people but that does sound like speeches made by persons on the page, written by someone who doesn't listen to the rest of the world or know how to make a plausible imitation of it.

The appeal of this book is to the language of television, of bodice-rippers, of the Harlequin Romance. It is incapable and irresponsible writing, unmediated by thought or the gift of artifice, or by the author's belief in a character sufficient enough to move him.

I picked up Bridges because of all the hype surrounding it and ended up throwing it against a wall. The writing is sappy, cliched and straight out of Freshman English 101. It also defied logic. Bridges is a shinning example of the power of publicity. I was very, very disappointed.

The scariest thing about this book is that people think it's any good.

I read this book a few years ago out of curiosity to see what all the fuss was about. As I read it, I realized, to my astonishment, that the strictly standard Harlequin Romance I had read a few years previously, again out of curiosity, had been much better.

Harlequin Romances, if the one I read was any example, are at least workmanlike. You get what you pay for.

This book, on the other hand, is such an abject failure of any kind of writing that you don't know whether to laugh aloud at the writer's incompetence or cry at what has happened to people's standards of what makes a good book.

The writing is not just bad; it is stupidly, triumphantly bad. The characters are not believable and what the author has them thinking and saying is riddled with unintended comedy.

If you want to read something better than this book, go to a drugstore book rack, close your eyes, put out your hand, and take home the first paperback romance you pick up. If you want to read something much better, there are books on similar themes recommended in some of the previous reviews.

A one-star rating is far too high for this book, but it is the lowest Amazon will go.

I don't mean to sound insensitive, but if this book were a horse, I'd have to shoot it. No, really; it's that bad. I don't know a single English professor who ever read it. It was smarmy and pretentious. When I read the line about a "star creature on a comet's tail", I was groaning out loud. And when I read "I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea", I found myself hoping that those sails would be capsized by a hurricane. And the part where Francesca's children read about her lovemaking really creeped me out.

"Yes, kids, nothing says healthy like reading about your mother's adulterous sexual escapades."

Overall, despite its hype, this is nothing we haven't seen before. You read one romance novel, you've read 'em all. Kind of like Stephen King novels. If you're truly curious, pick it up at the library. You'l laugh until you realize that it's not a comedy.