Customer Reviews

The Good Soldier

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The post-mortem of a good-on-paper marriage that much later turned out to be even less than the little the narrator thought of it. The crux of his questioning of the marriage really is, "If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?" Is it possible for something to be bad if you don't know it? Where does the bad lie? Is it something empirical? Does it have to be measured in order to exist? Or is it a property of something waiting to be discovered and measured?

This book really describes fully the needs of a person to be acknowledged and the consequences of acknowledging the fullness of another. The non-affair that kills Edward really only hurts him because he acknowledges something that had probably been building for a while, but harmlessly while it went unnoticed. Acknowledgement is really the driving force behind the novel, both in the positive and negative aspects. The impetus of the narrator's story is his final acceptance of what his marriage really was, an acknowledgement of his wife's true nature. But at the same time that he is criticizing his wife for her shortcomings, he is illustrating his own and acknowledging them. He sees that he allowed himself to be deceived and so was a party in his deception. The question that comes to me is would he have been happier without the knowledge? Would I be happier if I didn't have the knowledge, being in his place? Do we need to know or do we want to know? And why? Is it just to punish ourselves, show ourselves how little we really matter? Is the thirst for acknowledgement a way to verify our own existence or a way to embitter it?

"We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist."

I've appreciated this book more as I've grown older. When I originally read the story I was a younger man; as I've aged, the dilemmas faced by the characters and the story have become more real to me and to how I see the world. This is a great book with lasting lessons.

So, I am about 400 books into the 1001 books to read before you die (I'd better read faster) and THE GOOD SOLDIER is my favorite book so far. I think it just hit the core of a strong feeling I have, that no other author has struck. Life is just such a whirlwind of stupidity but FMF illustrated an interesting apex in this wonderful book.

I love this book. Found it on Kindle free.. Had heard about Ford Madox Ford forever but not read anything he had written. English, wrote and edited literary magazine in early 1900s. I am going to search him out. Very undated and insightful tale about the changing relationship of two upper-middle English married couples. I haven't yet finished it but am really enjoying it.

This production of the novel is unreadable. Pages are almost square. Margins are narrow. Each line of type stretches too far from left to right.

For readability, the standard rule is 60 characters per line. The lines here are about 85 characters. Short paragraphs are manageable, but there are many long paragraphs in this text. When the paragraphs run ten or twenty lines deep, it is very difficult to move from the end of one line back to the beginning of the next.

Also, there is no copyright information or publisher name anywhere in this production. It's just a bunch of words with the author's name. The only hint is a note on the back page: Made in the USA, Lexington, KY, Jan 25, 2012 (two days ago). Obviously, it's a print-on-demand version. But how do I know it's the copyrighted version that the author actually wrote?

I'm going to return it and buy a different production.

I don't know why I liked this so much. The characters are all selfish unsympathetic twits. They don't really do anything dramatic, and yet I could not put it down.
John Beyerlein
Liz & Dick