Customer Reviews

3 Paperback Set: The Affair, Time of Hope, The Conscience of the Rich

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

 

 

One of the finest works of fiction that I have ever read. It just gripped me, from start to finish, in clean, tight, expressive prose. Hard to believe it is fiction, it reads so like an autobiography. Finishes in the summer of 1933, when Eliot is 27. So much of the book is devoted to his obsession/passion/love for Sheila Knight. I came to understand, as he did at the end, that he had no other choice but to love her, even though she would come close to ruining his ambition and career. Snow has a way of deliniating a human character so that you see it to the core, and always contrasting that nature with the events and circumstances that surround it. How much choice do we really have? That is the point. Utterly gripping.

..."Time of Hope" has its Keating analogue do the narrating (it's in first person). Yes, we assume Dominique Francon considers herself superior to Keating, whereas Sheila waffles in this respect over Elliot, but here there is no Howard Roark to compare Elliot to. Yes, Keating is a plagiarist as well as a social climber, but he plagiarizes only Roark, and again here there is no Roark. Yes, Elliot calls Sheila "schizoid" and seeks to characterize her as a sort of Zelda Fitzgerald, but her actual behavior in the book has nothing whatsoever of the psychotic about it.

So what's the point? Beats me. This is a story of a man determined to rise from the lower class who does--to a point. He comes to decide that his rise is checked by the very thing that engendered it, his mother's ambition for him, but this is HIS reading; he may be wrong.