The Marriage Plot

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With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.It s the early 1980s the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever In the caf s on College Hill, the wised up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the Talking Heads But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels As Madeleine tries to understand why it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth century France, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes Leonard Bankhead charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus who s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can t escape the secret responsible for Leonard s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face to face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives. Best Read [ The Marriage Plot ] By [ Jeffrey Eugenides ] For Kindle ePUB or eBook – kino-fada.fr Pretentious. I try to stay away from this word reviewing books, because too many of my favorites literary novels have been called that and it hurt But The Marriage Plot is pretentious And also pompous, elitist, privileged and self important.I just can t quite believe that the author who managed to make stories of 5 suicidal girls and a Greek hermaphrodite so compelling, coul...Masterful on many levels At first I wasn t drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it That s the way people are, and the way life goes We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it s what happens ne...I m convinced this is what happens if you combine a Whit Stillman script, Franny and Zooey, and a whole lot of beige There s some beautiful writing here, unfortunately there s equally lot of bland writing It doesn t help that the characters are dull either At times, I couldn t believe that this was nine years in the makingyet at the same time I could Let s just say the writing has a certain over wrought feel to it.Madeleine, the main heroine is a snooze She s basically a stock dream girl I m convinced this is what happens if you combine a Whit Stillman script, Franny and Zooey, and a whole lot of beige There s some beautiful writing here, unfortunately there s equally lot of bland writing It doesn t help that the characters are dull either At times, I couldn t believe that this was nine years in the makingyet at the same time I could Let s just say the writing has a certain over wrought feel to it.Madeleine, the main heroine is a snooze She s basically a stock dream girl to quote one passageShe may have looked normal on the outside but once you d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated insideUh, how about no I m not sure if this was something on the authors part to show us how much Mitchell the third corner ...While there are passages that are beautiful in only the way Eugenides can write, they actlike flashes of brilliance in an otherwise dull and lazy novel.The first part of the book shoves Semiotics into your brain and reads like the most terrible and awkwardly pretentious college courses that no one should ever have to suffer And throughout it all, I kept feeling like this book was only for English majors and maybe Philosophy majors , and had an agenda that did not involve telling a good s While there are passages that are beautiful in only the way Eugenides can write, they actlike flashes of brilliance in an otherwise dull and lazy novel.The first part of the book shoves Semiotics into your brain and reads like the most terrible and awkwardly pretentious college courses that no one should ever have to suffer And throughout it all, I kept feeling like this book was only for English majors a...The experience was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina , until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure But this particular novel, thank goodness, isn t at all like this Its thoroughly affecting and modern, smart and hella funny it has very few of those moments of nothingn The experience was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina , until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure But this particular novel, thank goodness, isn t at all like this Its thoroughly affecting and modern, smart and hella funny it has very few of those moments of nothingness, of the reader just exhaling in deep confusion, exasperation What...I loved The Virgin Suicides for its style, imagery and voice I loved Middlesex for its epic storytelling, its characters and a lyrical flight of fancy near the end that I think I ll never forget Because of the lofty standards the author s previous works set for me perhaps it is inevitable, despite the trademark humor and intelligence evident in this novel too, that this one couldn t live up to the others Perhaps it s just that the elements I liked in this novel didn t add up to a cohesive w I loved The Virgin Suicides for its style, imagery and voice I loved Middlesex for its epic storytelling, its characters and a lyrical flight of fancy near the end that I think I ll never forget Because of the lofty stand...3 stars to Jeffrey Eugenides s The Marriage Plot My book club selected this a few years ago, given they had all previously read Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides before I joined I ve since moved and not with that book club any, but I keep in touch with many of them I hadn t read either book, but I did watch the movie The Virgin Suicides and I drove through a town called Middlesex in NJ, whenever I would go back and forth to college in Pennsylvania I suppose that doesn t count for much, 3 stars to Jeffrey Eugenides s The Marriage Plot My book club selected this a few y...I d loved the author s tour de force Middlesex and had recently worked through his anthology of short stories, Fresh Complaint, where I came across a tale that really interested me well, in truth, it spooked me a little too The story, written in 1996, is called Air Mail and it concerns a young man called Mitchell who is suffering badly from a bout of diarrhoea whilst temporarily staying at a remote beach in Thailand The ending of the story is ambiguous did he just die I just didn t kn I d loved the author s tour de force Middlesex and had recently worked through his anthology of short stories, Fresh Complaint, where I came across a tale that really interested me well, in truth, it spooked me a little too The story, written in...Okay, fine, Jeffrey, you win You made me care about these twenty something white college kids despite myself Setting certain crucial sections in a the psych unit and b a hospice in India was probably what saved you, as well as a loopy last five pages accellerando during which you niftily dump the marriage plot device on its head Also some unvarnished sex scenes andthan one wincingly convincing young couple argument But you know what I still hold you to those first 200 pages of REALL Okay, fine, Jeffrey, you win You made me care about these twenty something white college kids despite myself Setting certain crucial sections in a the psych unit and b a hospice in India was probably what saved you, as well as a loopy last five pages accell...I am trying to decide if I really liked this book so much because I really liked it so much, or if I really liked it because it made me feel smart without really having to do anything I fear it is the latter, but check ...

The Marriage Plot
  • English
  • 26 December 2017
  • Hardcover
  • 406 pages
  • 0374203059
  • Jeffrey Eugenides
  • The Marriage Plot