Wiele osób powie, że ta książka jest nudna, bo mało się dzieje, a niektóre wątki są rozwleczone.
Zgadzam się poniekąd z tą wypowiedzią, ale po historii mającej ponad 100 lat, nie spodziewałam się tak współczesnego przekazu.
Zakończenie pozostawiło mnie z otwartą buzią i łzami w oczach.

For an avid Francophile, I notoriously don't like books set in France. I've read this twice before, once in high school where I gave it five stars, and once sometime after, where I gave it one. I feel middling about it this time around.

Charles is fine. Sydney is sad, and I'm into that. I find myself bored by Lucie, and wonder how on earth Will and Tessa would name their child after her. However, on making it to that series, I don't like that Lucie either, so I suppose it's fine. Five stars for Dr. Manette.

A far, far better historical thriller...


Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton in the 1958 film version.

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...’ begins Charles Dickens’ thrilling novel set in England and France during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. It tells the story of the return from London to Paris in 1792 of Charles Darnay, the Marquis of Evremonde, an aristocrat who had renounced his title and privileges, to help a forlorn servant in his former household. The lives of all those around Darnay - his wife Lucie, her father Doctor Manette, the lawyer Sydney Carton and spy Barsad - become bound into the ensuing intrigue and danger.

Dickens describes so well the wild, fickleness of the mob gathered for Darnay’s trial at the Conciergerie, and the sense of evil abroad in Paris at night as the people sharpen their weapons on a bloody grindstone in the St Germain courtyard of Tellson’s Bank. The callousness of the aristocracy is accounted for too, as a relative of Darnay’s ploughs over a child in his carriage and horses and tosses a few coins out of the window in ‘compensation’.

The book details how social injustice and the abuse of power led to a merciless vengeance on the aristocratic class. Personifying it is the Republican ringleader, Madame Defarge, who knits, mechanically adding the names to the register for vengeance at her wine shop with other revolutionaries: they who refer to each other in code as ‘Jaques’. “Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop, but don't tell me,” she says, as the ‘Reign of Terror’ rises to its excesses.

Whilst reading the novel on a recent trip to Paris, I felt able to enter through its pages into the city’s history. The dark iron keys from the Bastille fortress lay in a glass cabinet at the Carnavalet Museum, and the paintings there depict scenes from the period vividly in oil. At the Conciergerie were the straw-floored cells where suspects were kept before being brought for trial at the Revolutionary Tribunal upstairs. Queen Marie Antionette’s cell is left as it is thought to have been. At the ‘corner of last goodbyes’ in the women’s courtyard, the condemned waited for the tumbrils to take them to the Place de la Concorde - the losers in the ‘lottery of Sainte Guillotine’.

‘A Tale of Two Cities’, a reference point for my own novel ‘The Silencer’, sweeps towards a tense climax and the central act of Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice for the good of Lucie Manette and her family. As Carton walks through the streets of Paris and lingers by the River Seine contemplating all the faults and mistakes in his own life, the words of Christ rise within him, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even though he is dead, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die’. And so the famous words ascribed to Sydney Carton as he ascends the scaffold in his final moments are: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Ce est un livre superbe!

By the reviewer:
n  n

Ανεπανάληπτοι χαρακτήρες( εκτός απο την Λούσι που ήταν απλά όμορφη και αντε και κάπως αποφασιστική στην αρχή αλλα μετα χάνεται), υποδειγματική εξέλιξη της πλοκής και κλιμάκωσης της έντασης. Αποδεικνύεται περίτρανα γιατί ο Ντίκενς είναι απο τους δημοφιλέστερους συγγραφείς που πέρασαν ποτέ απο τον κόσμο τούτο. Γιατί ψυχαγωγεί και δημιουργεί προσοδοκίες πείθοντας σε να συνεχίσεις την ανάγνωση.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...". The opening line says all that is needed to be said about the book. The time was worst, for it was tainted with hatred, violence, and vengeance. The time was also the best because there were love and compassion which endured it all.
The only historical novel that I've read of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities moved me like none other. I can still feel the effect of the suspense and tension even when writing the review a few days later.

Set on the backdrop of France before and after the French Revolution, Dickens weaves a sensitive and sympathetic tale on all those affected while laying down the grounds which caused the frenzy. Dickens's historical portrayal is balanced and impartial. He shows what lead to the uprise of the peasants so brutally against the king and aristocracy. They were suppressed and were treated no better than animals. When people are so treated like beasts for a long time, it is no wonder that they would turn beasts eventually. That is what happened with them and Dickens is full of sympathy and empathy. But the reign of terror that followed exercised more than retributive justice. Like the bloodthirsty vampires, it hunted the innocents whose only crime was being of aristocratic blood. Dickens boldly exposes this monstrous side as well. He doesn't judge the frenzied Republic, nor condemn it, but he compares the action to a season of pestilence where some will have a secret attraction to the disease. In short, Dickens shows the abuse of power by both aristocrats and the republicans equally.

The story is one of the warmest of Charles Dickens. Witty and bold would be my description of Dickens's writing, and it may extend to being sympathetic. But I wouldn't have associated warmth with his writing. So it seems I still haven't fully comprehended him. The story drew me in from its opening. Though it had a bit of a disorganized structure and some repetitive writing, it was a solid four-star for me. The storyline was beautiful irrespective of the brutality and my nervous tension.

The characters, being few (another surprise for a Dickens book), it was easy to keep close contacts with them all. I've read many reviews of the book where it was said that they disliked Lucy Manette, so I went into the read with a prejudiced mind. But to my surprise, I liked her from the start. I also liked Charles Evremond, Dr. Manette, and Sydney Carton. I felt that all of them were victims, and were full of sympathy. The latter, however, rose to the heights of a hero at the end, and without prejudice, I believe Sydney Carton is the noblest hero that ever graced classical literature for giving his life to keep a life dear to the woman he loves. While I'm at the characters, I must say a word about the villain of the story. It is none other than Madame Defarge - a sinister woman - a sworn enemy of the aristocratic Evremond family (with reasons of course), but who displays a disproportionate propensity for vengeance. Charles Dickens seems to have surpassed Dumas there, for Madam Defarge surpassed Milady de Winter of The Three Musketeers in her villainy.

The book was a solid four-star as I already mentioned until I reached the final few chapters. Those few chapters took me through such a bittersweet journey that my rating jumped up another star and complemented the book with a firm five star.

A Tale of Two Cities is my fourth Dicken's novel and so far, the best. Gloriously colorful characters come to vivid life, this time against the backdrop of the bloody French Revolution, the conditions that led up to it, the storming of the Bastille and the Reign of Terror.
Dickens was, of course, a harsh critic of social conditions, especially those of class structure and disparity that existed in England in his lifetime. So taking a look back at history, at the oppression of the peasant class by the aristocracy in France that led to the Revolution perhaps served as a warning to his own countrymen.
Without delving into the many characters and plotlines that make up the story, I will just say that Dickens has constructed a beautiful novel with a narrative rich in descriptive prose, colorful dialogue and beautiful passages. He makes good use of of many literary devices such as symbolism, imagery, irony and in one memorable chapter early in the book, foreshadowing. In book one, chapter 5 a cask of wine breaks open outside a wine shop in France, spilling into the street. The people dive after it, scooping it up, sucking it up, soaking it up any way imaginable. The streets and people are stained red, foreshadowing of course, the bloodbath we know is to come.

A number of coincidences move the plot along and especially near the end, coincidences abound. This was common in Victorian literature to tie up loose ends, to bring them together. 'Deus ex machina' was the term for this stylistic device employed by many authors of the time period. Love it or hate it, it is what it is. Dickens biographer John Forster tells us: "on the coincidences, resemblances and surprises of life Dickens liked especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought it; we were all so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart were so constantly elbowing each other; and tomorrow bore so close a resemblance to nothing so much as yesterday"
I can dig that.
All the stars.

The Most Dickensian Novel, and the Least Dickensian Novel, …

… his skinniest and yet his most fleshed-out fantasy, his most universal and his most personal book. That’s pretty much what can be said about Dickens’s second historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, which was published in 1859. Frankly, when I was re-reading this bi-metropolitan tale, I did not have the feeling that great expectations were lying ahead of me, for my first encounter with the novel lots of years ago left me mildly disappointed. This was simply not the Dickens I adored: Where was the abundance in sub-plots that would by and by be woven together by the untiring Inimitable loom? Where were the Mrs. Gamps, the Micawbers, the Captain Cuttles, Silas Weggses, where was Sam Weller? (Okay, we have Miss Pross, but few and far between are her appearances in the novel). Where was all that vastness that we associate with Dickens?

Maybe, I was just too much impressed with his longer novels to see, because now, 25 years later – what a terrible thing to realize that it has taken me a quarter of a century to rediscover this novel, and that I am already so old as to be able to look back on … ah, let’s leave it at that – 25 years later, I have finally come to appreciate the merits of a novel which I would rank among Dickens’s finest achievements. At an usually blistering pace, for Dickens, it tells its story of hatred and vengeance, hopes lost and re-gained, and human sacrifice. Admittedly, this kind of summary could do for almost any good Victorian novel (and maybe also for some of the Brontës’ books), and therefore here’s the story in a nutshell. Do we need a spoiler warning for a more than 150-year old classic novel?

In 1775, the French physician Dr. Manette, who was imprisoned on the grounds of a lettre de cachet, an arbitrary warrant obtained by a minion of the French monarch, is released from prison and taken to London by his old friend (and business partner) Mr. Lorry. Due to his mind-shattering experience of twenty years of incarceration, Dr. Manette is a physical and mental wreck but by and by, he is brought back to life again by the care and love of his daughter Lucie. Lucie falls in love with Charles Darnay, a descendant of the noble house of Evremonde, who has, however, severed his ties with his family because he was disgusted with the social injustices and abuses his family (and French nobility in general) brought about the French people. When Darnay is tried for espionage, it is Sydney Carton, his lawyer’s dogsbody, and also a doppelgänger of Darnay, who manages to obtain his acquittal. Carton may be Darnay’s spitting image as far as looks are concerned but his outlook on life is fundamentally different: Although he was a gifted youth, he somehow never succeeded in making good use of his potential because he never seemed to care, and now he is a jaded and cynical young old man, given to drink even more excessively than it was usual in those days. It is Lucie, who brings back to life his better nature, and yet he knows that it is too late to reform, and that Lucie is already betrothed to another man – the man he saved. Lucie and Darnay get married, and Carton is a rare but regular guest at their house, more a friend of Lucie’s than of her husband’s.

In France, after centuries of injustice and exploitation, matters come to a head and the Revolution breaks out. Darnay is summoned for help by an old family servant and feels obliged to go to Paris, testifying in court in order to help this servant. What he fails to realize, though, is the risk he is running by going back into his forefathers’ country, where violence has started to become endemic and where the wife of a wine merchant by the name of Defarge seems to have taken a special deadly dislike against any single scion of the house of Evremonde. Unluckily, Darnay’s noble but irresponsible decision to go to France without telling his wife before prompts her to follow her husband and to take her child with her. It is not long before Darnay finds himself imprisoned again and faced with the prospect of execution – and this is the moment, when Sydney Carton, once more, comes to the rescue.

As there are hardly any sub-plots and also comic relief is meted out most sparsely, this novel at first sight seems untypical of Dickens and rather “skinny” but if you look closer, you will see that appearances are deceiving. Dickens got his inspiration for this very melodramatic novel when he was performing as the protagonist in Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep, which has a similar love triangle at its centre: A spurned lover, instead of comforting himself with the idea of what the object of his affections will be like ten years later, swears that he will kill the man who has been preferred to him, and then he does what most men in his situation would do. He joins an arctic expedition. As Fate, or Writer’s Whim, will have it, he realizes that one of the members of the expedition is the very man he vowed to kill, but when the expedition goes haywire, he does all he can to save this man’s life, even at the cost of his own, since he knows that the woman he loves will never be happy without that man. This is basically the plot of A Tale of Two Cities, a story of noble self-sacrifice; only Dickens chooses a setting in which he exchanges the threat through the unfeeling elements for a threat posed by human passions unleashed. By doing this, Dickens gives more scope to the moral implications of his subject-matter in that he not only tells a story of human self-sacrifice but also of what blind hatred and desire for revenge, as in the case of Mme Defarge, can lead to. At the same time, though, Mme Defarge is not an out-and-out villain because her background story makes us able to understand her hatred, if not its excessiveness. One must say, though, that as a historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities ultimately comes up short since Dickens does not really care about analysing the intricate cause-and-effect-relationships and conflicts that would eventually lead to the events of 1789. Neither do we read about people such as Jacobins and Girondins, but for all we know after reading Dickens’s novel, it was the Defarges and their friends who started the Revolution. And it was apparently evil noblemen who ran over children and exercised the ius primae noctis who incurred the wrath of the masses until finally the camel’s back broke.

Probably this is the case because for Dickens political life was basically moral in nature, i.e. people were not so much called upon to change society as to change themselves, to show more consideration for each other in their everyday lives. In the light of all the various experience we had in the 20th century of ideologues who thought that they were able to create new societies, yea even a new kind of man, Dickens’s view may still seem naïve but at least it is simpatico.

Yet, for all its universally moral implications, A Tale of Two Cities may also be, along with David Copperfield, Dickens’s most personal novel, and so it is doubtless no coincidence that in both these tales one of the central characters bears Dickens’s initials. The Tale was written at a time when Dickens’s own private life saw far-reaching changes with his final separation from his wife Catherine and his romantic relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan. As some of his former friends criticised Dickens’s behaviour and as his domestic situation must also have put him at the risk of offending Victorian mores and estranging his reading public from him, he may well have had the feeling, rightly or not, that he, like Sydney Carton, was sacrificing himself for his true love.

We might not agree with Dickens’s perception of his own situation here – at least, I don’t – but we might still greatly enjoy A Tale of Two Cities as a novel. At least, I do.

This was a re-read of an old favourite for me. It's been about 25 years, though, so long overdue. I'm not even going to try to review this masterpiece but let me just say one thing:

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'

Arguably the best opening line of any book ever written... but wait!

'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known...'

Definitely the best closing lines of any novel ever written and I will brook no frickin' argument on this one!

Both those quotes? From this book. 'Nuff said, fellow readers; 'Nuff said...

Świetnie napisana. Ostatni rozdział pozostawia wielką pustkę w sercu.

Dickens classic classic (purposefully repeated) tale centred around an English domiciled French family during the French Revolution in which he draws the love of his main female protagonist as the catalyst that beckons her suitors page by page to the blood splattered streets of Paris. The better of his his historical dramas, with one of the most famous opening lines ever written. 6 out of 12.

2009 read

It was the best of a far, far, FAR better thing that I do, than I have ever done.

I know that’s lame, but I’m out of ideas for an opening paragraph.

This is my second reading of A Tale of Two Cities and I doubt it will be my last. A lot of people who habitually read for pleasure probably would not consider reading this book because it is required reading in many schools and it would seem like anathema to a good time to read it when you don’t have to. This is unfortunate because I think this — like all Dickens novels — works best if you just read it naturally without trying to analyze the hell out of it on every page. I doubt that was Dickens’ intent.

I was considering writing a little synopsis which is part of the standard review structure for me, but it feels like summarizing* something like  Frankenstein, superfluous. The characters are worth looking into though, because Dickens always populate his novels with colorful, memorable characters; as well as a few flat ones, who are usually the “good guys”. A Tale of Two Cities has, at least, two characters that are practically legends of fiction.

First and foremost is poor Sydney Carton who — in spite of a boxy name — is the true hero of the story. Throughout the novel he seems like a side character, he even views himself as a supernumerary individual among his “friends”, who are more like people he likes to visit, though they don’t really know why he often shows up or what to do with him.
“Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done any good, and never will.”
Sydney has no self-respect or any sense of self-worth but redeems himself in an epic manner by the end of the book. He is fascinating if a little unbelievable in how far he would go to serve the love of his life, Lucie Manette.

Lucie comes straight from Dickens’ stock of impossibly angelic pretty women who would rather die than say boo to a goose (which is a crazy pastime in any event). She has very little in the way of personality or agency and seems ill-suited to the much deeper Carton (I feel another pun coming on). Charles Darnay — the dull “romantic lead” of the novel — suits her much better, but at least he galvanizes the story when he chooses to go to Paris at the worst possible time for someone of his background, and without making any precaution. Lucie’s Dad, Doctor Manette, is marginally more interesting than her daughter because when he gets very upset he does not hit anybody, instead, he shuffles off to his room and start cobbling shoes! This makes sense to me, if everybody could be like this, instead of wars and terrorisms we would have mountains of shoes. Which do you prefer?

This (somehow) brings me to Madame Therese Defarge, Dickens’ most badass antagonist.

(Thank you Video Spark Notes for the art).
I hesitate to use the word “villain” here because she is not evil per se. She has her reasons for going on a murderous rampage and hacking people’s heads off with a knife, it is all done in the name of the French republic as far as she is concerned.

“Her husband's destiny,” said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure, "will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is to end him. That is all I know.”

The best thing about her is that — when she is not off exterminating aristocrats — she is always doing some scary knitting.** I have gone on too long about the characters I think, I’d just like to mention Miss Pross, Lucie’s governess who is almost as badass as Madame Defarge, and is a great foil for her.

These colorful characters make the novel for me, the plot is only exciting because we care about the characters. In A Tale of Two Cities Dickens created a microcosm of life during the French Revolution and shows as that even with the heart in the right place much evil is still perpetrated in the name of good. That still rings true today, unfortunately. Dickens' prose is — of course — awe-inspiring. He effortlessly switches from sardonic, to comical, to lyrical from paragraph to paragraph. There are numerous witty or pithy lines you can quote from, on practically every page. Having said that, the language is not particularly challenging to read, if you read contemporary fiction regularly I can't imagine why you would have any difficulty reading Dickens, the English language has not mutated that much since Victorian times.

A Tale of Two Cities is a book I can recommend to anybody, but especially people who dismiss reading it because they had to read it at school. That is no reason to deprive yourself of a book this enjoyable.



* I’m not allowed to use the verb synopsize (hi Cecily!)

** I have met a lot of women who are a bit like Madame Defarge actually, well, they like to knit, but they don’t go on murderous rampages as far as I know. I did say a bit.

Notes
Some people say A Tale of Two Cities lacks the humour of Dickens’ other novels. I beg to differ, Miss Pross is always good for a laugh and Madame Defarge’s knitting and the secret signals she sends through her hat are pretty mirthful. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

This reread was done mostly through Librivox's free audiobook, read by Paul Adams, a little overly dramatic at times but a good and fun rendition. Thank you!


(Thanks, Cecily!

انا بيت قديم جدرانه من الخوف شرخت✒
انا نكتة حلوة اتكررت و أهي بوخت
انا ارض بور اخذها الهم حق انتفاع
انا باب مقفول من سنين ومفتاحه ضاع
اهلا بكم في مدينة سيدني كارتون..حيث للعدل وجهين..و للتضحية معنيين..و للحب لونين..و للثورات منتفعين


كارتون من زعماء الكآبة عبر العالم و هو سبب وقوعي في سحر الروايات منذ درست قصة مدينتين في سن 15 و حتى يومنا هذا ..كارتون بضياعه و رماديته و تجرده و كابته التي اوصلته لاعلى مراتب الحرية ؛ يستحق لقب: اكثر ابطال الادب رومانسية على الاطلاق و لو حظت اي فتاة بمثله في الواقع؛اذن لقد فازت و كفى

قصة مدينتين هي ملحمة تاريخية عن الثورة الفرنسية ؛عن ماهية الحرية ؛ درة الادب الانجليزى لأسباب لا تنتهى. .ابطال متناقضين ..احداث متلاحقة. .حبكة محكمة..صدف تغيظ
و اخيرا لانني زرت المدينتين: باريس قبل قراءة الرواية بسنوات و لندن تو ما فرغت منها..و اؤكد ان زيارة قبو متحف مدام توسو بعد قراءة قصة مدينتين ؛ كان من اكثر تجارب حياتي سوادا و رعبا

لا تشرق الشمس على منظر اكثر حزنا