{"id":427,"date":"2012-04-09T13:16:36","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T11:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=427"},"modified":"2012-04-09T13:16:36","modified_gmt":"2012-04-09T11:16:36","slug":"giving-up-on-a-masterpiece-ford-madox-fords-parades-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/04\/09\/giving-up-on-a-masterpiece-ford-madox-fords-parades-end\/","title":{"rendered":"GIVING UP (ON A MASTERPIECE): FORD MADOX FORD\u2019S PARADE\u2019S END<\/em> <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t feel much compunction when abandoning a book that fails to interest me. So many fish in the sea… why bother to stick to one chosen freely and that can be equally freely abandoned? (quite another matter are the books I must read, for teaching or research… and the many I read as a student but never enjoyed). Yet, one thing is giving up on a run-of-the-mill book whereas abandoning a masterpiece seems to be quite a different matter.<\/p>\n

This Easter holiday I gave myself as literary homework reading Ford Madox Ford\u2019s tetralogy Parade\u2019s End<\/em>, all 836 pages. Why? Well, I just love his novel The Good Soldier<\/em> (1915) \u2013unfairly regarded as one of those second tier books that needn\u2019t be taught\u2013 and I happen to be a sucker for anything on WWI (it\u2019s a very rich field for anyone interested in masculinity.). And Parade\u2019s End<\/em> is a masterpiece<\/em>, or so many readers and critics claim. Soooo…. about 70 pages into the first novel, Some Do not…<\/em>, I realised that I had already tried reading the tetralogy years ago but had forgotten I\u2019d given up mid-book. The problem? I couldn\u2019t see the hero protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, and I mean in a very physical sense \u2013he seemed to be both the manliest man ever and a fish-eyed, soft-bellied, bland slob. Above all, this being a Modernist novel, characters talk and act in the weirdest possible way (um… yes, they\u2019re upper class!), something further complicated by Ford\u2019s decision to narrate in odd time loops, with events being recalled in quite an oblique fashion rather than narrated in your regular dramatised scenes, Austen-style. Yet, I decided to plod on. Cultural capital and all that…<\/p>\n

Since 20th century novelists don\u2019t bother to describe their characters as the Victorians did, I\u2019ve got the really awful habit of casting actors in my personal reading. This time I got lucky because by a strike of serendipity, it turns out that a TV mini-series based on Parade’s End<\/em> and scripted by none other than Tom Stoppard, is being currently filmed, with Benedict Cumberbatch (of recent Sherlock Holmes fame) as Tietjens. This bit of information helped me go more smoothly through 240 of the 288 pages of Some Do not…<\/em> until the moment came to make the decision to plod on for yet 548 pages (a bad sign, isn\u2019t it?, counting pages). <\/p>\n

I checked the Wikipedia for tips about the content of the three following books, as Tietjens, though shell-shocked, is not seen at the front in the first book, and that was what I was looking for. I checked Amazon.co.uk for readers\u2019 opinions, and found a dismayed reader who had gone through the whole tetralogy but who, disliking the snobbish characters, felt \u201crelief\u201d when reaching the end. I discovered Good Reads<\/em> (www.goodreads.com<\/a>), excuse my monumental ignorance, where many, many readers praised to high heaven Ford\u2019s \u2018masterpiece\u2019 while a handful despaired. After two hours of trying hard to find renewed motivation I decided to give up.<\/p>\n

Seeing how Parade\u2019s End<\/em> is included in diverse list of the best fiction in English ever, and realising it must have been truly hard to write, I\u2019m considering whether what we mean by \u2018masterpiece\u2019 needs to be revised to include books that are<\/em> masterpieces but that are also unreadable without a great deal of perseverance. I\u2019m not talking here about Ulysses<\/em>, which I can claim to have read, ehem, or Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>, my most spectacular failure to date, but this other kind of contemporary novel which while being representative of a certain artistic, literary trend \u2013whether Modernism or something else\u2013 no longer works and runs even the risk of becoming a relic. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll watch the TV adaptation of Parade\u2019s End<\/em>, in the hopes of returning to the tetralogy one day, but it\u2019ll be rather for Stoppard and Cumberbatch (what a surname!) than for Madox Ford. Yet, it\u2019s funny how instead of feeling that Madox Ford fails as a writer in his foursome I feel that I have failed as a reader<\/em>. This is what trying to get a literary culture does to you. Luckily, my other Easter novel, Benito P\u00e9rez Gald\u00f3s\u2019s Miau<\/em> (1888) has turned out to be as brilliant as promised by that Spanish Literature teacher who recommended it to us, students, more than thirty years ago. I\u2019ll leave the problem of keeping reading lists for some other entry…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t feel much compunction when abandoning a book that fails to interest me. So many fish in the sea… why bother to stick to one chosen freely and that can be equally freely abandoned? (quite another matter are the books I must read, for teaching or research… and the many I read as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-adaptations","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}