Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant, unconventional mathematician, is married to the dazzling yet unfaithful Sylvia when, during a turbulent weekend, he meets a young Suffragette by the name of Valentine Wannop. Christopher and Valentine are on the verge of becoming lovers until he must return to his World War I regiment. Ultimately, Christopher, shell-shocked and suffering from amnesia, is sent back to London. An unforgettable exploration of the tensions of a society confronting catastrophe, sexuality, power, madness, and violence, this narrative examines time and a critical moment in history.
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Ford Madox Ford was an editor, an essayist, a critic, an advocate, and a novelist. He is the author of The Good Soldier, Parade’s End, and The Rash Act, and the coauthor, with Joseph Conrad, of The Inheritors and Romance. Max Saunders is a professor of English and the codirector of the Center for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature and the editor of Ford’s Selected Poems and War Prose.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By desefinado
Format:Paperback
Reread "The Good Soldier" last year and thought it was revolutionary for its time. "Some Do Not ... " is really more amazing. FMF has mastered a technique in which the character's memory of events is brought into the narrative present like the conjoining of two rivers, creating an intentionally disjointed but richly textured layering. I am in thrall of this unique and complex technique which gives the sense that the characters are real, while explicating their disconnectedness from their time (WWI). You really have to read this to believe that it can be pulled off. Why isn't this novel (the opening novella of "Parades End") more highly regarded and better known?
Format:Paperback
Amid the curious Downton Abbey fancy that has swept up American television viewers (among whom I too am swept up), I decided to read Ford's tetralogy after having seen a New Republic review call the BBC/HBO television adaptation, in effect, "Downton Abbey for grown-ups." Chronologically, the first installment of the four novels, Some Do Not... covers much of the same ground as Downton Abbey but in a distinctively modernist way - jumping with little announcement from pre-WWI to post-WWI and back again, obliquely foreshadowing events readers will learn about only much later, if at all (other installments will fill in some of the blanks), with long stretches of stream-of-consciousness narration, and so on. So many shades of Faulkner, well before Faulkner - at least in this first novel in the series - but written closer to the languorous, lapidary style of James as well taking up the clash between tradition and modernity that preoccupied both James and Faulkner.
Ford is a master chronicler of the tensions posed by traditions under assault from urbanizing industrial society, the absurd slaughter on the continent and its hollowing out of a generation of promising Britons, and the rise of democratic political, social, and economic forces that would eventually overwhelm a decadent, gradually impoverished aristocracy. Ford encapsulates all this splendidly in the saga of the dysfunctional Tietjens family - the brilliant, magnificently upright Christopher and the brilliant, beautiful, magnificently destructive Sylvia (portrayed, I must add, to absolute perfection for television by Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall) as well as the inevitable third corner the triangle, the game, thoroughly modern, indefatigably loyal suffragette, Valentine Wannop, whose presence sharpens Tietjens family relations and drives the discordant narrative strains forward.
No short commentary can convey the the majesty of Ford's writing or the keenness of his psychological perceptiveness, bound by the time and the myriad ways in which "change" imprint upon and alter the minds and behaviors of various players, both major and bit. Some Do Not... stands by itself and can easily be read alone as a great novel. It does, nevertheless, whet the appetite for more and is thus a perfect start to what I expect to be a sweeping, thrilling, and, naturally, bittersweet Tietjens saga.
Ford is a master chronicler of the tensions posed by traditions under assault from urbanizing industrial society, the absurd slaughter on the continent and its hollowing out of a generation of promising Britons, and the rise of democratic political, social, and economic forces that would eventually overwhelm a decadent, gradually impoverished aristocracy. Ford encapsulates all this splendidly in the saga of the dysfunctional Tietjens family - the brilliant, magnificently upright Christopher and the brilliant, beautiful, magnificently destructive Sylvia (portrayed, I must add, to absolute perfection for television by Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall) as well as the inevitable third corner the triangle, the game, thoroughly modern, indefatigably loyal suffragette, Valentine Wannop, whose presence sharpens Tietjens family relations and drives the discordant narrative strains forward.
No short commentary can convey the the majesty of Ford's writing or the keenness of his psychological perceptiveness, bound by the time and the myriad ways in which "change" imprint upon and alter the minds and behaviors of various players, both major and bit. Some Do Not... stands by itself and can easily be read alone as a great novel. It does, nevertheless, whet the appetite for more and is thus a perfect start to what I expect to be a sweeping, thrilling, and, naturally, bittersweet Tietjens saga.
