Erm..... well, I finshed Bloody Chamber two days ago, but was in Blackpool and deprived of interent access, so I'm only writing up my opinions now. I wish i had thought to jot them down on paper, because i am having a hard time remembering the book itself, never mind what I thought about it. Oh well!
Actually, to be honest, the book was not as bad as I had anticipated. The short story structure worked well for me as I found the book itself a little boring and so the way it was split into ten sections encouraged me to read more at once.
However, through out reading this book, i kept thinking that there was supposed to be some meaning at the end of each story, for example in, "The Lady in the House of Love," the last line was, "Next day, his regiment embarked for France." I was unsure if that was meant to mean anything significant, if not I'm confused as to why it was given it's own new paragraph. And so I spent most of this book thinking I really am not understanding what is going on. So it was tres hard not to give up and read something easier.
Missed meanings aside, my favourite of the stories was, "The Tiger's Bride," unfortunately, this is not becasue it was particularly good, but because I have something negative to say about all of the other stories. I really id not like the story, "The Bloody Chamber," as i found that it took such a long time for the actual storyline to get going, I mean I'm sure this is intentional to set the scene and such, but i really was sehr bored by the time the woman found her husband's previous wives.
Overall, I guess, if I am being nice, I'd give this book 4.2/10.
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4.2/10? That's very accurate.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean about knowing there are deeper meanings but not quite being able to make them out all the time - I felt the same with some of them. I really enjoyed the story 'The Bloody Chamber' though and certainly wasn't bored by the time the girl found her husband's ex-wives! I really got into that one - admittedly, some of the other stories ('The Erl-King', for example) left me a little baffled but on the whole, even when I didn't fully understand what the 'hidden meaning' was meant to be, I appreciated the way in which it had been written. I had to stop myself from looking at the first few stories in an English Language way to be honest...think of the adverbs and the pre-modifications!! :D Ok...maybe I'm easily impressed but, if you look at the first few stories from a linguistic point of view, they're awesome I think...and I love a good metaphor...maybe I just need to get a life :|
ReplyDeleteSorry for waffling on!!