{"id":2968,"date":"2022-12-12T20:06:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T20:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=2968"},"modified":"2023-02-12T21:23:09","modified_gmt":"2023-02-12T21:23:09","slug":"the-good-soldier-ford-madox-ford-1915","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2022\/12\/the-good-soldier-ford-madox-ford-1915\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>The Good Soldier<\/i> &#8211; Ford Madox Ford, 1915"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This had been on my radar for ages (so much praise for this book!), so I was happy the Second Monday group chose it (and I volunteered to lead the discussion, with questions mostly pulled from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bookcompanion.com\/discussion_questions_the_good_soldier.html\">BookCompanion<\/a>). A very interesting book technically, which I admired but didn&#8217;t exactly enjoy &#8211; as a novel it&#8217;s very weird. It&#8217;s famous as a showcase for one of the most (and earliest?) unreliable narrators in fiction, who contradicts himself constantly and appears to be unbelievably na\u00efve. Ford repeats certain phrases like &#8220;the carefully calculated&#8221; or &#8220;normal, virtuous, and slightly deceitful&#8221; which has a kind of hypnotizing effect. I only have one &#8220;in this book I learned&#8221;: pococurantism &#8211; indifference, nonchalance. Only short quotes, also &#8211; which I think is a result of the style of the writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;you, silent listener beyond the hearth-stone&#8221; (the reader)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;God knows what they wanted with a winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till October. But there it was.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Doctors who advise that Florence not travel because it &#8220;might have effects on Florence&#8217;s nerves. That would be enough, that and a conscientious desire to keep our money on the Continent.&#8221; (as in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2022\/11\/the-magic-mountain-thomas-mann-tr-by-h-t-lowe-porter\/\"><em>The Magic Mountain<\/em><\/a>)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;The fellow talked like a cheap novelist. Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it&#8217;s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor\u2014a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one&#8217;s character or in one&#8217;s career. For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one&#8217;s small meannesses.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;Florence was a personality of paper &#8230; she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;Here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of the mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;You see, Leonora and Edward had to talk about something during all these years. You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live with a person unless you are an inhabitant of the North of England or the State of Maine.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;The Hurlbirds were an exceedingly united family\u2014exceedingly united except on one set of points. Each of the three of them had a separate doctor, whom they trusted implicitly\u2014and each had a separate attorney. And each of them distrusted the other&#8217;s doctor and the other&#8217;s attorney. And, naturally, the doctors and the attorneys warned one all the time\u2014against each other.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;There was upon those people&#8217;s faces no expression of any kind whatever. The signal for the train&#8217;s departure was a very bright red; that is about as passionate a statement as I can get into that scene.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This had been on my radar for ages (so much praise for this book!), so I was happy the Second Monday group chose it (and I volunteered to lead the discussion, with questions mostly pulled from BookCompanion). A very interesting book technically, which I admired but didn&#8217;t exactly enjoy &#8211; as a novel it&#8217;s very [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quote-dump","category-second-monday-book-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2968"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3115,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions\/3115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}