I’m reading “Pride and prejudice” and I’m strangely enjoying it. I like the characters and the story, I’m really hooked with the book, but I don’t really know why it is so interesting and how Austen makes me feel interested in a book that, maybe just in the surface, is so mundane.
In the past, I also read “Sense and sensibility” for University and I also enjoyed it very much.
How do you think Austen makes this? How does she make a realistic and simple book so interesting in its story and its characters?
by Jerges1
4 Comments
I think she hits just the right note of sarcasm, where it’s still sweet and charming.
I’m no Literary critique but her prose is poetic to me. When I read “Pride and Prejudice”, the entire book felt like a single poem. It’s Impossible not to enjoy every word.
Sometimes the way the plot comes together is very charming
I have zero idea why you would use the adverb strangely here – literally millions of readers have enjoyed the novel and millions more will too; there’s nothing remotely strange about enjoying P&P.
Martin Amis, long before he was a writer, fell under the spell of the novel; he writes: “When I was introduced to the novel, at the age of 15, I read 20 pages and then besieged my stepmother’s study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth. (I needed to know that Bingley married Jane.) I needed this information as badly as I had ever needed anything.
“Pride and Prejudice suckers you. Amazingly—and, I believe, uniquely—it goes on suckering you. Even now, as I open the book, I feel the same tizzy of unsatisfied expectation, despite five or six rereadings. How can this be, when the genre itself guarantees consummation? The simple answer is that these lovers really are “made for each other”—by their creator. They are constructed for each other: interlocked for wedlock. Their marriage has to be.”
You are responding to a great plot, great wit, great prose–literally nothing strange about it.