Wednesday 6 April 2016

Trollope, Anthony "The Way We Live Now"


Trollope, Anthony "The Way We Live Now" - 1875

Classics belong to my favourite reads. I have read all the "Barchester" books by Anthony Trollope and really liked them. Now, this is my next book by this great classic author. A very big book, one of those tomes I love.

The novel centres around a rich man of whom nobody knows where his money comes from. He has a daughter he wants to marry off to someone of high status but she loves someone else who in turn is just after her money. Well, that's the whole story in short but there are a lot more people in between and a lot more stories that happen to all of them. And Anthony Trollope manages to describe everything so well. His writing is almost poetry.

A wonderful book. If you like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, classics and "chunky" books, I cannot recommend this story too much to you.

From the back cover: "The tough-mindedness of the social satire in and its air of palpable integrity give this novel a special place in Anthony Trollope's Literary career. Trollope paints a picture as panoramic as his title promises, of the life of 1870s London, the loves of those drawn to and through the city, and the career of Augustus Melmotte. Melmotte is one of the Victorian novel's greatest and strangest creations, and is an achievement undimmed by the passage of time.
Trollope's 'Now' might, in the twenty-first century, look like some distant disenchanted 'Then', but this is till the yesterday which we must understand in order to make proper sense of our today.
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2 comments:

  1. Saw a BBC production of this a few years ago and it was excellent, have always meant to read the book.

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    1. The tv series is still on my wishlist but I'm sure I'll watch it one day. The BBC productions of the classics are just excellent.

      I'm sure you'll like the novel jsut as much as I did.

      Thank you,
      Marianne

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