Thomas Hardy - Search and Destroy

Search: "Far From The Madding Crowd". We read this for English class at school, and it didn't make much sense. We got lost in the scale of the novel, and bogged down by the teacher's need to continually make wisecracks. So I didn't like it by association. Several years later I re-read it and realised that it's a fantastic novel.

It's a long time since I read Hardy, and my tastes might be different if I re-read him now. Of the "major" novels I preferred those I thought of as more "poetic" -- Tess, The Woodlanders, The Return of the Native -- I was a bit less keen on The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd. The Woodlanders is the underrated gem (and I think Hardy's own favourite). Jude is a category of its own -- I can see why its proto-Modernism might make it some peoples' favourite Hardy, but I didn't find it a particularly enjoyable read. Of the less famous novels, I've only read The Trumpet Major and Under the Greenwood Tree, both slight but enjoyable, the latter being unusual (possibly unique?) among Hardy's novels in having a happy ending. (The pretty heroine, Fancy Day, has the good instincts to reject sophisticates from out of the village and marry a local lad, so sidestepping the dark fate awaiting Hardy protagonists who try to engage with the world beyond rural Wessex).

Some of the poetry is superb, especially the later stuff, but you may need to do a bit of work to acquire a taste for it - it can seem clumsy, repetitive and old-fashioned (even for its time) at first reading. He wrote an enormous amount of it, and the critical orthodoxy is that you need to dig out the gems from among the dross, but Larkin once said that his only problem with Hardy's poetry was that there wasn't enough of it.

The Dynasts is a real curiosity - weirdly cinematic, almost suggesting Hardy could have been a great director if only the technology hadn't been lagging behind. A bit of a hard slog to read, though, and its philosophical preoccupations have dated, not because Hardy was wrong but because truths that seemed like revelations to a man sloughing off of conventional Christianity seem obvious to the point of banality in our more godless time. I wouldn't exactly destroy it, but I wouldn't recommend it either.

The Dynasts is a real curio. I've always liked the excerpted choruses and songs.

The Woodlanders certainly needs more attention. It has one of my favorite scenes in literature: Winterbourne hides in a tree while his lover calls his name.

I was going to be a smartass and challenge everyone with The Dynasts, but I haven't been able to stand reading it. It is jaw-dropping.

Although I once spotted a pocket-sized paperback edition, and would have liked to have that just as a curio.

I read Two on a Tower last week. Thoughts here.

are they trying to trick people into thinking that the actor tom hardy wrote this movie
http://i1354.photobucket.com/albums/q686/tinyservants/Screen%20Shot%202015-05-18%20at%2012.09.17%20AM_zps6tgyzhgt.png

based on the play by
billy shakespeare

mr. anne hathaway

reading A Pair of Blue Eyes, which boasts a weird scene in which the heroine rescues one of her lovers, who is dangling from a precipice, by ripping her clothes to shreds, tying them in knots, and throwing this makeshift rope over the side.

I think in some editions it's clear she's using her knickers, but this was changed to be a bit more vague after howls of scandal on first publication

i started Far From the Madding Crowd today. First Hardy novel I've read for pleasure - I read Tess in highschool lit but barely remember it.

Am enjoying Madding so far. Much more wry than I expected, and I love the descriptions of the landscape

Madding was gorgeous & dramatic! I enjoyed it so much, tragedy notwithstanding - good god what a heavy load

Am now moving onto Tess. I feel like a whole world has opened up now that I am enjoying Hardy.

Also the rural depictions esp sheep shearing in Madding surprised me by making me more than a little homesick for my country town & farm-y childhood. Never thought I'd get nostalgic for sheep shearing of all things, lol

haven't read any of the novels since my teens/early twenties, but reading some of his short stories recently added a new dimension to my appreciation... need to get deeper into the poetry at some point.

& finding out not long ago that furze = gorse has changed my mental image of hardy country somewhat.

the heath in Return of the Native is the main protagonist iirc

had to do madding crowd at school, so i've got a natural aversion to hardy.

Tess is amazing, not least because Hardy doesn't present her as a wronged woman: she's a wronged woman with a sexual appetite.

i failed o level english lit. we did 1984, Macbeth and Far From The Madding Crowd. i am currently rereading the latter. there is so much in it i'm sure i would've remembered even after 30+ years - hitching a ride on the dog. the coffin tampering. the grave drenching. the drowning. but no. i can only assume i didn't bother reading it all at the time.

i loved Tess, liked Jude, thought Two on a Tower was a bit ridiculous with all its revelations, Native was ok. but the language of Madding Crowd, some of the sentence structures, i'm struggling with. i can see how 16 year old me would've been unimpressed.

(ah, Two On A Tower was initially published in serial form. so the suspiciously frequent revelations were cliffhangers.)

The Woodlanders is the underrated gem (and I think Hardy's own favourite).

I reread it this week. Quite a few passages show him at his gnarled best: anthropomorphized descriptions of wind rustling through old beech and oak trees, with Matty South and Winterbourne understanding their language w/out Hardy making too fine a point of it (wonder if Tolkien cited him as an influence).

> D: Novels such as The Laodicean.

i'm quite enjoying this. half way through, wondering where it's going to go.

(it was dictated on his death bed (he got better))

spent January reading sf and blood meridian. had already planned on reading Mayor of Casterbridge but wasn't sure if i'd be in the mood for it last night when i started. but bang, gripped immediately.

Read Greenwood Tree late last year and the same thing happened. will spend February finishing off Mayor and the two short story collections, which will mean I've read everything in that first category they mention on Wikipedia, "Novels of character and environment"

easily one of my favorite poems:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

Wow. Of a piece with that one Rilke poem.

His self-taught rhythms are uniquely his.

oh yeah i love that. what’s the title?

"The Voice."

the dying fall in the last line...

It’s in the extremely handy Penguin Book of English Verse, edited by Paul/P.J. Keegan