Pubblicato inizialmente a puntate, com’era uso nel tempo, da William Thackeray nel 1848, questo poderoso romanzo, raccontando la vita e le opere di due amiche, la dolce Amelia Sedley e l’intrigante Rebecca Sharp, mette il naso con piacevole ironia nella società inglese del tempo, bacchettando a destra e a manca senza pietà e misericordia usi e costumanze, atteggiamenti e opinioni. Un romanzo che si legge con molto piacere grazie alla leggerezza di scrittura, a una trama avvincente e a personaggi credibili, e nonostante la mole, non mostra nel suo incedere cadute o inciampi ed invece tira dritto superando le 800 pagine senza mai annoiare, intrigante e stuzzicante.

I am not entirely sure how to respond to this book. It does not help that I finished Wives and Daughters and Middlemarch just before this one, both of which I, strictly speaking, enjoyed more. I wouldn't put Vanity Fair on my favorites shelf. But I think from a classic standpoint, this one carries the day over those two. It was one of those books you read and then discover you've known it all your life because it has impacted Western civilization in some distinctive way. The characters Thackeray draws ring true to life not just because I recognized them from the people around me, but because his distinct slant of looking at them found an echo in the literature that followed.
It is an interesting book. It has wonderful contrast in its heroines and something of an antihero in Becky Sharp. (She reminded me of Lady Susan.) Much like Dickens, Thackeray never met a rabbit trail he didn't like but he breaks the fourth wall enough to make it amusing and even inserts himself in the narrative at a random point.
Sometimes it felt like a bit of a slog but I am truly glad I read it.

جرعه جرعه نوشیدم این کتاب رو

[edit] Inizio a vedere la miniserie della BBC.







«Vanità delle vanità, tutto è vanità»*

Penso che, per i miei gusti, si tratti di un romanzo tirato un po' troppo per le lunghe, un po' tipo Il conte di Montecristo: evidentemente il feuilleton non è il mio genere preferito.
Mi sono piaciuti i continui ammiccamenti al lettore, il parlare di punto in bianco di famiglie e personaggi che non c'entravano nulla con la trama al solo scopo di contestualizzare e spiegare determinate situazioni, le uscite di scena senza troppi clamori, lo scenario politico (quante stoccate ai francesi!), i costumi e le usanze, un po' meno troppe lungaggini tipo le ormai famose sciarade.
Thackeray mette in scena una rappresentazione in cui tutti i burattini - proprio così li definisce! - non fanno altro che mettere in mostra, criticare e ridicolizzare i difetti del genere umano.
Nessuno si salva: uomini, donne, e persino bambini, non sono esenti da avidità e bramosia di potere, e tutti ruotano, come calamite impazzite, intorno al denaro, vero ed unico protagonista del romanzo.
Nessuno è perfetto, anche quelli che sembrano vittime buone, hanno i loro difetti (e Thackeray, nel dubbio che ci si possa affezionare ad un personaggio a discapito di un altro, non dimentica di sottolinearceli e mostrarceli dopo aver cercato di nasconderli per bene magari per tutto il romanzo!), così come i "cattivi" non sono mai completamente cattivi e del tutto negativi.

La Fiera delle Vanità è prima di tutto un romanzo corale, in cui spiccano le figure di Rebecca, unico esemplare umano non appartenente alla piccola aristocrazia inglese che Thackeray ci descrive, che cerca in tutti i modi e con ogni astuzia (più o meno lecita) di conquistarsi un posto da protagonista tra "i ricchi", e di Amelia, destinata invece per estrazione ad un futuro pieno di agi, il cui unico desiderio è quello di coronare il suo sogno d'amore sposando il caro George Osborne, giovane ufficiale e suo promesso sposo fin dalla tenera età; è un bellissimo affresco dell'epoca Vittoriana, che ci mostrerà come tutto sia serio e niente importante fino in fondo: persino la battaglia di Waterloo, e prima ancora i preparativi per la partenza dei battaglioni inglesi diretti in Belgio, sembreranno agli occhi del lettore come i carrozzoni di un circo itinerante, chiassosi, variopinti, spesso volgari ed espressione di un mondo in cui, anche per andare in guerra, era necessario partire scegliendo il cappello adatto e con la moglie al seguito.
Preferirete la dolce e remissiva Amelia o l'intrigante e manipolatrice Rebecca? Farete il tifo per il fedele e servizievole Dobbin o per l'affascinante e limitato Rawdon? Riderete del pingue Jos o dell'imbalsamato Sir Pitt?
Sappiate in ogni caso che chiunque sceglierete, di chiunque deciderete di prendere le parti, non sarà altro che frutto della vostra imperdonabile e irrefrenabile vanità.

«Ah Vanitas Vanitatum! Chi di noi è felice in questo mondo? Chi di noi raggiunge quello che desiderava, o avendolo raggiunto, è soddisfatto? Venite, ragazzi, riponiamo baracca e burattini: la commedia è finita.»

Per una volta mi viene da fare un raffronto che forse sarà campanilistico ma:
1844 - Il Conte di Montecristo (Dumas) - Francia
1848 - La Fiera delle Vanità (W.M. Thackeray) - Inghilterra
1894 - I Viceré (F. De Roberto) - Italia
È vero, tra i primi due e I Viceré ci sono circa cinquant'anni di differenza, ma non c'è confronto: una volta tanto, "mattonazzo per mattonazzo", c'è un abisso a nostro vantaggio .

*Vi ricorda qualcosa? :-)

Spoilers!



Miss Rebecca Sharp's Guide to the Regency Society


1. If a young lady is not born into either rank or fortune, she will be looked down upon by good society and forced to exist in a humiliating dependency on others for life, unless the said young lady is willing, nay, not merely willing, but most strenuously strive to improve her situation.

2. If the said young lady, despite being a poor orphan, happens to have the good fortune of being admitted into an exclusive academy for young ladies as an articled pupil, she has to ensure that she makes the utmost effort to learn everything that she could in that fine establishment. The modern languages, Greek, Latin and the rudiments of Hebrew, as well as music and dancing are important subjects that need to be mastered by an accomplished young lady, but most important of all is the ability to speak good French with the purest Parisian accent, for it enables the speaker to pass herself off as a daughter of the French aristocracy, even though in reality her mother is a mere stage actress.

3. “A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry whom she likes”. A wealthy husband should be prospected immediately after the young lady completes her education. The brother of a school friend is most suitable, even if the said young man is a fat dandy and not very sensible, as long as he is of ample inheritance. Beware of the gluttonous young buck though, for an overindulgence in a bowl of punch might thwart a young lady’s designs on him!

4. “Schoolmistresses' letters are to be trusted no more nor less than churchyard epitaphs”. There are notable exceptions, it must be admitted, but they are exceedingly rare. Nevertheless, the young lady, should she fail in her initial effort to land a wealthy husband, should endeavour to gain a letter of introduction that would recommend her as a governess to the most respectable of households. Such households, though populated by dissolute aristocrats, might house a number of potential spouses. A younger son of a baronet, even though he is a scoundrel, gambler, swindler and murderer, is a most suitable prospect, provided that he is to inherit an elderly relative’s fortune.

5. “Let them show ever so little inclination, and men go down on their knees at once: old or ugly, it is all the same”. A little sweet talk and a wink, and they all fall on your feet bearing trinkets of pearls and gold. It doesn’t matter a whit if he happens to be your best friend’s husband, nor if you yourself is somebody’s else’s wife. It is best, however, if the gentleman admirer is a wealthy, powerful nobleman, for the advantages that a clever lady could get from him, financially or otherwise, is great indeed. Why, not only is he able to provide the lady’s household with a thousand-pound cheque at a whim, he is also able to bestow a profitable colonial governorship on the lady’s husband. Beware of the jealous husband, though, who through an imaginary affront to his honor might destroy all of the lady’s clever schemes!

6. How To Live Well On Nothing A Year. Appearances must be kept: a residence in Mayfair, a smart carriage, the best game and wines for one’s entertainments, and the latest Parisian fashions. How to afford all these when one has no regular income? Not to despair, the ingenious lady always has means to do so. Prevail upon the generosity of friends and relatives. Impose upon your landlord and your greengrocers, washerwomen and other domestics. Unlike banks or Hebrew money-lenders, these little people are very unlikely to set loose a bailiff upon your respectable self, especially if they are in awe of your noble family.

7. If all these schemes fail, and both your husband and gentleman admirer abandon you in a cloud of scandal, despair not! A lady of some talent can always flee abroad and sing for her supper, if necessary. Better still, if you could rekindle a relationship with a former beau, now older and ailing, who though his own fortune is much encumbered, would take a life insurance naming your pitiful self as a beneficiary. The small fortune that ensues from such a settlement is surely enough to tide you over until your estranged son succeeds into his baronetcy and is finally able to provide you with a generous allowance. Then you can spend your declining years as an admirably pious and charitable society lady. Thus a penniless orphan girl need not condemn herself to a life of servitude and penury, but instead rise into the pinnacle of society through her industry and ingeniousness!

“Such people there are living and flourishing in the world—Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful too, mere quacks and fools: and it was to combat and expose such as those, no doubt, that Laughter was made.”

This is a very different sort of tome. The author refers to it as a puppet play, and it has a removed quality. You have to be willing to see the characters as caricatures, to see the author is making fun of them, and not to mind when he does. It was hard for me to adjust to this. I wanted more nuanced characters, more empathy from the author. It took me hundreds of pages to figure this out, but I did end up liking the second half more than the first, just because I got used to the style.

I’d heard about and was looking forward to Becky Sharpe, but was very disappointed. I wanted, if not to like her, to find her a fun and fascinating bad girl. Unfortunately though, she just reminded me of manipulative tyrants I’ve known: those people who use their good looks or God-given talents or turns of fortune to connive their way to their goals, treading on those with morals in the process.

I tried to appreciate her anyway, for her cleverness, but I didn’t see a lot of cleverness in her. Scarlett O’Hara was clever. Becky was just ruthless, and frequently helped along by men who admired her. (Maybe it’s just a different twist. Scarlett was written by a woman, after all.) Becky may have been smart, good with languages, and had style. But Scarlett made a dress out of a drapery for heaven’s sake. That’s clever.

But this is the problem I kept having. I wanted characters, and I got caricatures. I wanted empathy, but the author called his creatures “our simpleton,” or “a spooney.”

For what it is--especially for what it was: a serial published for 19th century readers--it has brilliance. I’m glad I read it and experienced Thackeray’s satire. On finishing though, I wished I could speak to dearly departed authors, two in particular. I’d say to Charlotte Brontё, “Your over-the top gushes about Thackeray were misplaced, my dear. Jane Eyre was infinitely better than this!” And then I’d pat Dickens on the shoulder and say, “No threat to you, old man. No threat at all.”

There was a girl I knew in school that made my formative years (for this purpose I'm considering the "formative years" to be 11-14) a bloody hell. She was a nasty, manipulative, cruel girl who, unfortunately for me, also had the luck of being beautiful and popular. She was wretched to the little people, and I was a little person. She was mean to me but I so wanted her to be my friend because I thought if I was her friend and a part of her circle, then everything would be okay. Life would be perfect.

I remember one day in class as we were down to the last few minutes before the bell, our teacher just let us all sit around and talk. There was a school dance that evening and it was all anyone wanted to talk about. The teacher happened to ask this popular girl if she was looking forward the dance. This girl made a comment that has stayed with me all these years: "Yeah, but I still haven't decided how I'm going to act tonight." The teacher asked what she meant by that and this girl went on to explain, "Well, if I act sad I can get a lot more attention from people, like the boys." She said it so nonchalantly, as if this was something she did every day, like waking up and brushing her hair; looking back I realize she probably did. She probably did think about what sort of attention she would get based on how she behaved. I was sort of scared of her in that moment - someone my age who knew more about human nature than I thought I ever could, someone who knew how to manipulate everyone around her. It was freakish and sort of awesome all at once.

I thought of that girl a lot while reading Vanity Fair. Becky Sharp is just as dangerous a character as that girl I knew was in real life. The concept of "being nice" was foreign to both of them; why bother being nice to people who couldn't get you anywhere in life? Why bother being nice to someone who is, for all intents and purposes, below you? It's a crazy thought process but that's what Becky (and this other girl) were all about.

What's interesting to me is that Becky is not really the main character of the story. Just like that girl I knew in school. As far as I was concerned at the time, the sun rose and set because of her. Everyone knew who she was, everyone wanted to be her friend, even the teachers. Looking back as an adult I realize everyone was really just afraid of her as I was, but I thought there was something more to the power she held. But no, she (and Becky Sharp) were just that insidious. There were other people in the school - myself included - but none of those other people mattered when she was around. Same holds true with Vanity Fair. There are other characters, like Amelia, but they're almost completely overshadowed by this really insignificant person - even during the parts that didn't include Becky, the reader is just waiting for her to step her precious little foot back into the story.

I hear that this girl from my school days is married and has some kids and has found religion. I'm told she's not as bad as she used to be. But I'm not going to lie - that girl messed me up, and now I can't imagine her being a good mother to her kids; I sort of think she probably treats them the same way Becky Sharp treated her own child in the story: as a nuisance, serving only the purpose of gaining attention for herself when necessary. Perhaps that's being unfair to that girl from school to imagine that's how she is; everyone can change. Hell, I'm not the same kid I was back when I knew her, so chances are she's just as capable of change as well. But a part of me needs her to still be that nasty little bitch I knew then because it makes me feel better about me - which, funnily enough, isn't that different from Becky Sharp at all.

The truth of the matter is that we all have a little Becky Sharp in us somewhere. It may be larger piece in some than in others, and maybe we all have a little bit of Amelia as well (who isn't quite as interesting but worthy of a little disgust thrown her way too, just for different reasons). We all love having someone to hate on - for some it's the Kardashians, for some it's Lady Gaga. It contributes to the way society works, and no one is free of it. We love to hate, and Thackeray wrote some characters in Vanity Fair that are absolutely delicious to hate - it's just Becky Sharp is the strongest of them all.

'Cause she's a bitch, through and through.

After reading this book I'm left with one question I keep asking myself: Did I like this book? The truth is: I still don't know.

The story revolves around two women: Rebecca and Amelia. The first a daughter of an artist and an opera singer. The second a daughter of a wealthy merchant. The writer uses them to prove his point about society being vain, shallow and full of hypocrites. That makes for interesting reading, but also some frustrating moments. Especially Rebecca is one annoying person. She pushes herself into society in which she doesn't "belong" by lying, cheating and mentally hurting people. Every bit of her character just rubs me the wrong way. But on the other hand: who can blame her for wanting to be a part of society? The part of society you are born in doesn't define you. So my feelings toward her are very conflicting. Without her scheming ways she wouldn't be able to move up.

Almost every character in Vanity Fair is of course vain and I appreciate the point the writer is trying to make. But does it make it an enjoyable book to read? Not necessary, no. Some passages I liked and got through quickly. Some passages were agonisingly tedious and long. The book is too long. Thackeray could make his point in 300 pages and make it a great book.

I guess I did enjoy some of the book. I liked the satire, but the novel was way too long.

Vanity Fair is sometimes called the best British novel ever written, but it's totally not. Middlemarch is way better. Honestly, VF's not even in the top ten. So why do people love it so much? Because of Becky Sharp. Which is funny, because she's not what it was supposed to be about.

Becky Sharp is to Thackeray as Satan is to Milton. The argument has been made in both cases that the author secretly intended us to love their most memorable characters, but that's not true - or at least it's not that easy. While both dominate their stories, both authors are clearly uncomfortable with the fact that that's happened.

Vanity Fair didn't really take shape until Thackeray turned it into an autobiography: the Amelia / Dobbins story, which he thought of after he'd submitted the first few chapters and which caused an eight-month delay while he reconfigured the story, mirrors his own one-sided love affair with his friend's wife. Dobbins is based on himself. And their story is an important counterweight to Becky's; without it, the novel would be a slighter work about a femme fatale, arguably more fun but less important. With them it turns into a sprawling landmark in realist literature, one that unarguably influenced War & Peace.

But Amelia and Dobbins are such milquetoasts that Becky insists on running away with the book. They're nice people, and you root for them, but during their chapters...you wish it would get back to Amelia's frenemy.

And Thackeray attacks Becky, again and again, viciously. His most telling attack is in her constantly reiterated failure to love her son, which is a mortal sin in Victorian novels as it is in the rest of them. A father can occasionally be forgiven for not loving his children; never a mother. But there's also this deadly passage toward the end of the novel, in which he defensively compares her to the old-school, evil mermaid:

"Has [the author] once forgotten the rules of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling around corpses, but above the waterline, I ask, has not everything been proper?"

It frankly feels like Thackeray is punishing Becky for taking over the book that he'd tried to take over himself. He sounds confused: like he wishes the whole novel was a moral one, and realizes only now that it's failed to be that. (Remember, this book couldn't be retooled; it was released in installments, and everyone had already read the rest of them.)

Consider also the ending. Becky has a moment of magnanimity and reconciles Dobbins and Amelia. Then she turns around and murders Jos. (Don't try to argue that she didn't murder him. Thackeray may not say it, but he leaves little doubt.) Which feels more honest to you? Which feels like something Becky would do? She's a calculating, immoral woman who may have been (but probably wasn't) involved in countless affairs by this time, but did you get the sense that she's a murderess? Thackeray's book has gotten away from him, and he's betraying her in an attempt to snatch it back.

Compare this with Middlemarch, also a landmark realist novel, and also one released in installments, but one in which it's perfectly clear that Eliot had the entire plot, thread by thread, perfectly planned from the beginning. Eliot never lets her book get away from her. And when I say that, and when you consider the fact that Middlemarch includes no character as compelling as Becky Sharp - she would have despised Dorothea - it sounds like Vanity Fair might be more fun than Middlemarch, but it's not. Thackeray's sense of human nature isn't as strong as Eliot's (or as Tolstoy's), and the novel isn't as satisfying.

It's good, because Becky Sharp escaped from somewhere in Thackeray's brain and took it from him. What doesn't belong to her is just okay.

Well it took me a while to get through it, but I ended up really enjoying the book. A very ironic and witty story patronising British society during the Regency period. It was actually quite sad how it all ended up in the end. What tumultuous and difficult lives these characters led. So much false propriety and dishonesty. Oh there were the few moral pillars but they didn't usually fair too well amongst these sorts. Anyway, quite an enjoyable read. Which was most definitely enhanced by the audio narration and performance of Mr. John Castle.

I read Vanity Fair as part of my occasional series of “forgotten classics”—meaning not classics that the rest of the world has forgotten, but classics that I have practically forgotten myself, having first read them several aeons ago.

It was an interesting experience to revisit this novel (interesting in the euphemistic sense of not entirely pleasurable.) There were some things I liked about it, certainly. There’s something attractively mobile about Vanity Fair. I like the way you’re never quite allowed to settle as a reader. Thackeray varies his narrative voice throughout, sometimes pulling us into the principal plot and its emotional entanglements, and sometimes pushing us away. Even though the novel is basically realist in its idiom, it never quite forgets its framing metaphor of the puppet show and the framing allegory, derived from Bunyon, of the world as a fair of all the vanities. The novel’s “real” characters cohabit their stage with a vast cast of cartoonish extras, equipped with comedy names (Lord Methuselah, Mr Tapeworm, Miss Mango, Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone, Ensign Stubble.) Nor can we even distinguish clearly between these two levels of novelistic being, given that two of the principal “real” characters also have epitomizing names: Dobbin and Sharp.

As for the rest … hmm. I must say I had problems with the sheer unnevenness of this novel. You can make allowances, obviously, for how it was written (this is lovingly detailed in the World’s Classics edition I used, which is pretty scholarly.) The first four chapters were written a couple of years before the remainder; and the remainder was written on an instalment basis over almost two years, and very quickly (an episode a month.)

That’s all fine, and historically interesting, but, as a reader, my focus is on results, rather than process. Vanity Fair is kind of a mess, as you might expect from this process of composition. The first few chapters are woeful. It improves after that and gathers momentum pretty remarkably, but it’s still astonishingly hard to work out when you have finished reading whether the finished novel is simply incoherent, for historical reasons, or whether it’s brilliantly and challengingly unorthodox. The narrator’s stance towards some of his main characters changes dramatically in the final episode, for example—dramatically, to the point of unrecognizably. Is this a remarkable preemptive deconstruction of the entire Victorian moralizing-realist novelistic project? Or did Thackeray simply forget what he had written before?

Plot and narrative stance aside, the novel is also unneven at the level of style. Thackeray is capable of great moments. I loved this, from a description of a young woman sitting alone in her wealthy cavernous drawing room, gradually coming to terms with the fact that her life is to be one of involuntary spinsterhood, caring for her monster of a father.

The great glass over the mantelpiece, faced by the other great console-glass at the opposite end of the room, increased and multiplied between them the brown holland bag in which the chandelier hung; until you saw these brown holland bags fading away in endless perspectives, and this apartment of Miss Osborne’s seemed the centre of a system of drawing-rooms.

(She should probably have guessed her fate long before, when she realized that the main clock in the room was “surmounted by a cheerful brass group of the sacrifice of Iphigenia.”) Away from such high points, though, Thackeray is sometimes capable of whole passages that are just repetitive and phoned-in, presumably dating from times when he was racing for his monthly deadlines and had a lot of dinner engagements. I’m not sure I have ever read a classic novel that so screamed for the red pen.

Last but far from least, I was put off Vanity Fair by the whiff of racism it gives off. There are quite a few snide comments about the abolitionist movement scattered throughout the novel and a distasteful (would-be) comic portrait of a “mulatto” heiress, Miss Swartz, never mentioned without her Homeric epithet of “woolly-haired.” I investigated a little and it’s clear that these sneers weren’t casual or a lapse, but rather that they reflect a consistent racism on Thackeray’s part, nastily documented in his letters:

http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/thackeray/

You might say that a lot of Victorians were similarly unregenerate in their views, but I’m not sure it excuses him. If everyone had held the same views on the subject as Thackeray, he wouldn’t have any abolitionists to sneer at.

vanitas vanitatum!

ah, where to begin with this classic? it's long. that's for sure. but in place of the fact that one can find it daunting/overwhelming to read an 800-paged english classic, i encourage you to do so. this is your sign to read vanity fair, a novel without a hero. i may disagree with that tag line very much as i see major william dobbin as the foremost protagonist of the book, though introduced and written about in few scenes. the book mostly revolved on its two female characters, amelia and rebecca.

rebecca sharp, fronting the story, is one of the best representations of worldly spirits. damn, this book really gives you so much wisdom on greed, hypocrisy, betrayal, and ambition. however, do not be turned away by its satirical intent on such matters. it also dwells on rebecca's friendship with amelia, and how their adventure and growth intertwined throughout the chapters, resolving to the most realized act of friendship in the last few pages that i have read so far as my foray to classics is concerned.

from its historical-fiction type of writing, thackeray brings about his share of experiences in the napoleonic wars, the battle of the waterloo, and english society in the early 1800s. moreover its ties to reality, the book humorously condescends, and successful in doing so, the deepest pretensions of men and women through their caressed ego.

what i loved best about my journey with these characters is the fact that almost all of them (not you amelia) do know when another character is tricking them, but they brush off their awareness for a moment of flattery, and it's probably the gist of vanity fair: the vanity leaves you empty.

i highly recommend it to everyone, though it will benefit most diligent adult readers in terms of language, length, and themes