Wednesday, 7 May 2025 07:36 pm
Partial Book Review: Moll Flanders
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deckardcanineOnce again, I have given up on finishing a book. But for the first time in nearly seven years, I feel like saying more than a paragraph about it anyway.
Daniel Defoe was writing around the same time as Jonathan Swift, yet I find him much trickier to read. Maybe it's because this particular edition did not see fit to change the archaic casing, punctuation, font style, or spelling. There are also extensive endnotes, most of which felt more trivial than helpful to my comprehension. An early note mentions unorthodox grammar even for the time, supposedly on purpose. The editor did add one bracketed word but, for a few pages, accidentally left bold letters where there should have been superscript numbers. We also get long sentences and paragraphs on average, and there are no chapters -- not even short breaks cutting to other scenes like in Discworld. Here's an almost randomly chosen excerpt:
That's only about a third of the paragraph, and there are several more clauses before the first period. Just as well that we usually don't get whole dialogues. The shame of it is that if these lines were said aloud, I'd find little dated about them, let alone hard to process. Some turns of phrase I'd actually prefer to their modern equivalent, such as "He broke" rather than "He was broke."
It doesn't help that the narrator rarely calls anyone by name. I get that she's trying to protect others while confessing to her offenses, but if she can use a pseudonym, why not apply some more to them?
Anyway, the story itself isn't bad. "Moll" was born under unfortunate circumstances, and we get why she makes her controversial life choices, even as she admits how bad they are. The implied content is especially salacious for an old work. I wouldn't take the Hamlet-like view of adultery with an in-law as "incest," but it's still pretty scandalous.
Nevertheless, before I reached page 100, I became aware that I had lost track of some key points, and I was not about to reread for them. At least a lesser Shakespeare play reads poetically; this prose feels like a chore. Ah well, I knew going in that the book was a gamble for me.
I think I'll try a mystery next: The Cat Who Blew the Whistle. Lilian Jackson Braun's series is reputedly kind of insipid, but I bet it's cute.
Daniel Defoe was writing around the same time as Jonathan Swift, yet I find him much trickier to read. Maybe it's because this particular edition did not see fit to change the archaic casing, punctuation, font style, or spelling. There are also extensive endnotes, most of which felt more trivial than helpful to my comprehension. An early note mentions unorthodox grammar even for the time, supposedly on purpose. The editor did add one bracketed word but, for a few pages, accidentally left bold letters where there should have been superscript numbers. We also get long sentences and paragraphs on average, and there are no chapters -- not even short breaks cutting to other scenes like in Discworld. Here's an almost randomly chosen excerpt:
HE was very fond of me for about a quarter of a Year, and what I got by that, was, that I had the pleasure of seeing a great deal of my Money spent upon my self, and as I may say, had some of the spending of it too: Come my dear, says he to me one Day, Shall we go and take a turn into the Country for about a Week? Ay, my dear, says I, Whither would you go? I care not whither says he, but I have a mind to look like Quality for a Week; we'll go to OXFORD says he: How says I, shall we go, I am no Horse Woman, and 'tis too far for a Coach....
That's only about a third of the paragraph, and there are several more clauses before the first period. Just as well that we usually don't get whole dialogues. The shame of it is that if these lines were said aloud, I'd find little dated about them, let alone hard to process. Some turns of phrase I'd actually prefer to their modern equivalent, such as "He broke" rather than "He was broke."
It doesn't help that the narrator rarely calls anyone by name. I get that she's trying to protect others while confessing to her offenses, but if she can use a pseudonym, why not apply some more to them?
Anyway, the story itself isn't bad. "Moll" was born under unfortunate circumstances, and we get why she makes her controversial life choices, even as she admits how bad they are. The implied content is especially salacious for an old work. I wouldn't take the Hamlet-like view of adultery with an in-law as "incest," but it's still pretty scandalous.
Nevertheless, before I reached page 100, I became aware that I had lost track of some key points, and I was not about to reread for them. At least a lesser Shakespeare play reads poetically; this prose feels like a chore. Ah well, I knew going in that the book was a gamble for me.
I think I'll try a mystery next: The Cat Who Blew the Whistle. Lilian Jackson Braun's series is reputedly kind of insipid, but I bet it's cute.