Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier was my next read. You would think this story had something to do with the war since it was written in 1915 but it takes place from 1904 until 1913.
It is loosely based on Ford's life & adulteries that were present in his life but unknown what character would best represent himself. The title was changed from "The Saddest Story" to "The Good Soldier". One of the characters is a soldier but many characters were trying to be "good soldiers" in their life. When the book starts out the narrator, John Dowell, describes the events that took place over a span of 9 years. He tells his story to us after the events take place & writes it down as he thinks of the events which many times are told a little out of order. The story is about an American married couple (John & Florence Dowell) & a British married couple Edward & Leonora Ashburnham. They all meet at a German spa & travel throughout Europe on & off for 9 years. It seems quite confusing at first & during the course of the narration we become more familiar with the circumstances & changing attitudes of the characters. Many things are disclosed as the book progresses & the cause and effect of adultery has on the lives of all involved. The story has one thinking about how much adultery effects a marriage not just in the action but in how the affected react & responses that could do more harm. A very deep look into the psychological side of humans.

ویکی‌پدیا وعده‌های خوبی درباره این کتاب میده: یه کلاسیک برگزیده با راوی غیر قابل اعتماد، تعداد صفحات کم، نقد های مثبت و موضوع کتاب که درباره روابط دوتا خانواده که زندگی هاشون اونجوری نیست که بنظر میاد. چی بهتر از یه رمان کلاسیک میخوام؟ اما چیزی که گیرم اومد یه کتاب کسل کننده و پر از لفاظی بود با شخصیت های حوصله سر بر که به هیچ وجه آدم رو درگیر داستان نمیکنن. در نتیجه به صد صفحه نرسیده ول شد
درس مهم امروز: گاهی اوقات باید به نمره گودریدز اعتماد کرد...

I went into this book blind, knowing only the title, and thus expecting a book about war and/or its aftermath. But what I read was a book about marriage and adultery, and all the harshest and most painful memories of the people who hurt you.

The Good Soldier is told by a mysterious narrator who is remembering the events of two couples who meet at a German spa in the early 1900s. They become good friends and begin meeting once a year. Unfortunately this leads to an affair between two of them. It took some time for me to realize that the narrator was the American husband, who happens to be an arrogant man who is telling the story through the fog of memory. It is unreliable, focused only on his view of things and through questionable memory. The book also jumps around in time, with this man telling snippets of the tale as they come to his mind rather than in the order they occurred.

The book doesn't shy away from sharing the misery and grief that comes as a consequence of the affair. This tale of love is one of deception, the agony of wounds inflicted with intention, and the passion of love, loss and hostility. This book wasn't a simple read. And while I listened to it I wished I had a physical copy to read along.

"The Good Soldier" is a southern European opera masquerading as Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night". It's that nuts. I have no idea what these people think they are doing. Isn't it supposed to be the twentieth century? Aren't most of them supposed to be English? (America is represented by an effete narrator and his slutty wife.)

I was reminded of something Junichiro Tanizaki had someone think in "Some Prefer Nettles":
"Surely, he may say to himself, the problem, no matter what strong emotions it stirs up, can be taken care of with less grimacing, less twisting of the lips and contorting of the features, less writhing and straining towards the skies. If in fact it cannot be expressed in less emphatic and dramatic terms, then our Tokyo man is more inclined to turn it off with a joke than try to express it at all."

Although there are plenty of laughs, no one in "The Good Soldier" seems to try and "turn it off with a joke". They dash around, threaten each other, sob and kill themselves.

John Dowell, our narrator, says: "You may think that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to have been an imbecile." Yes, exactly. Are we 100% sure he wasn't banging his wife's boyfriends? This would seem to account for a feigned disinterest in her sex life. He says at one point: "If I had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards from a distance." Merely bromance? Frenemies with benefits? Is our unreliable narrator keeping something from us?

Regardless, "The Good Soldier" is absolute madness at every turn. Why on earth would Leonora post that letter to Miss Hurlbird? Do we really believe that Florence watched them in the garden for all that time? An officer in the British Army doesn't know how children are conceived? An educated young woman reads three newspaper articles about a divorce case and still has no understanding of the word "divorce"?

Sheer madness. "Mental is the Night". But it certainly isn't "The Saddest Story" because a) I spent most of the time laughing, and b) working class people were dying in coal mines just so that these bastards could move their various heart complaints around the railway network of Europe. Absolute shits, the lot of them.


"Oh, where are all the bright, happy, innocent beings in the world? Where's happiness? One reads of it in books!" declares Leonora ... I don't think Leonora and I are reading the same books. The books I read are about why we should all stab ourselves to death with small penknives.

"Have you ever seen a retriever dashing in play after a greyhound? You see the two running over a green field, almost side by side, and suddenly the retriever makes a friendly snap at the other. And the greyhound simply isn't there. You haven't observed it quicken its speed or strain a limb; but there it is, just two yards in front of the retriever's muzzle. So it was with Florence and Leonora in matters of culture."

"It is a thing, with all its accidents, that must be taken for granted, as, in a novel, or a biography, you must take it for granted that the characters have their meals with some regularity."

"and then she wished she had not done it; but it did not teach her anything and it lessened such esteem as she had for him."

I waffled a bit between 3.5 and 4 stars for this classic. While there were things about it that didn't appeal to me (some Catholic bashing for example), it made an impression on me & made me think. Two different but equally dysfunctional marriages are laid bare throughout the course of the book.

It is written in an unusual style that I am not sure that I liked but worked well here -- the narrator
writes as if the reader knew some fact or event that had not been revealed yet and then later explains it. For example, in the beginning of Part II, he is relating his own history talking about how he and Florence became married. He remarks "she might have bolted with the fellow, before or after she married me." What fellow? who is this person never before even alluded to? The reader begins to have suspicions of who it is and then several pages later it is revealed.

As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that this is a highly unreliable narrator. And his shifting perspective may be not so much of a shift as a revealing of underlying views formerly hidden (from the reader and perhaps from the narrator's own conscious mind).

An intriguing novel, written in precise and descriptive prose, portraying the depravity and hypocrisy of the Edwardian aristocracy and in particular a collection of despairing characters leading bleak lives, and enduring unfulfilling complex social and sexual relationships. There are mysteries waiting to unfold.

The narrator, a timid American outsider, John Dowell, seems naive in matters of love and passion, and is a passive cuckold , excusing his wife's subsequent infidelity by saying, 'I always say that an overmastering passion is a good excuse for feelings. You cannot help them, and it is a good excuse for straight actions.' Like climbing a rope ladder into your girlfriend's bedroom and making off with her in the dead of night and making her your wife, but then never consummating the marriage.

His naivety is compounded by remarks such as :
"It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me."


Yet, paradoxically, after his wife's death he philosophises knowingly about passionate love, and the emotional journey that lovers undertake :

' It is impossible to believe in the permanence of man's or woman's love. Or at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the permanence of any early passion. As I see it , at least in regard to man, a love affair, a love for any definite woman, is something in the nature of a widening of the experience. With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture, all cause to arise the passion of love - all these things are like so many objects on the horizon of the landscape that tempt a man to walk beyond the horizon, to explore. He wants to get , as it were, behind those eyebrows with the peculiar turn, as if he desired to see the world with the eyes that they overshadow.....But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported.'

Clearly the story parallels Ford Madox Ford's own tortuous emotional journey towards personal fulfilment, as he concludes triumphantly:

' And yet I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman, or no that is the wrong way of formulating it, for every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He will travel over no more horizons; he will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders; he will retire from those scenes; he will have gone out of the business.'

Decepcionante é a palavra. Talvez porque as excelentes referências acerca deste livro, me tenham criado expectativas que acabaram por provocar essa decepção relativamente à sua leitura.

O Bom Soldado conta a história de dois casais e mais alguns intervenientes que se relacionam através de uma série de infidelidades conjugais, narrada por um marido enganado. Pelo meio há quem morra, quem se suicide e quem enlouqueça. Os acontecimentos são narrados de uma forma propositadamente desconexa, sem um fio temporal linear e com mudanças frequentes do foco narrativo.

Embora não possa dizer que tenha odiado, também não houve nada neste livro de que tenha realmente gostado. A história demasiado rebuscada que se esvazia de interesse e significado, personagens que, cada a um a seu modo, achei tediosos e pouco verosímeis, e uma técnica narrativa que, se pretende prender o leitor, tal não resultou comigo. Tudo o que livro prometia ficou por cumprir - não senti drama nem comicidade, não o senti como "uma história de paixão" (como anuncia o sub-título) nem como "a história mais triste jamais contada" (como afirma a primeira frase). Ficou-me o sabor de uma história implausível e contada de modo atabalhoado que, sobretudo no início, por várias vezes me fez cair no sono. A partir do meio forcei a concentração e a leitura mais rápida para terminar depressa e poder passar a outra coisa.

Εξαιρετικό δείγμα μοντερνισμού.Βάζει κάτω από το μικροσκόπιο όλες τις συμβάσεις και τις εξετάζει με σκοπό την αποδόμηση τους. Ύστερα ξεκινά και επανατοποθετεί τις έννοιες όπως του ''κανονικού ανθρώπου'' η του ''καλού ανθρώπου'' μέχρι που μας δείχνει πως σιγουριές δεν υπάρχουν, τις σιγουριές τις πλάθουμε εμείς.
Τις ειρωνεύεται υπό μια έννοια, αυτό μου έβγαλε, που ουσιαστικά ειρωνεύεται τον ίδιο του τον εαυτό για τις ως τότε σιγουριές που ο ίδιο είχε στην δική του ζωή. Ίσως και η ίδια η εποχή << ξέμεινε >> από σιγουριά αν λάβουμε υπόψη την αρχή του πολέμου.
Μου θύμισε αρκετά Προυστ αυτή μαστορική εναλλαγή του μπρος-πίσω. Μέχρι την σελίδα 120 περίπου δεν με είχε ενθουσιάσει, για να τα λέμε όλα, αλλά όπως φάνηκε ήθελε κι άλλο χρόνο η ανάγνωση.

Καλή ιδέα σαν υπόθεση Από εκεί και πέρα όταν έχεις διαβάσει και έχεις τόσο ψηλά τον μεγάλο Γκατσμπυ από Φιτζέραλντ το όλο στυλ γραφής σου φαίνεται τέρμα βαρετό Ενώ ξεκίνησε καλά πριν από τη μέση παρακαλούσα να τελειώσει

Lots of books (novels and otherwise) attempt to mix the chilling and the blasé for that extra-cold "banality of evil" effect. Among novels, American Psycho comes to mind as a possible least-favorite and The Good Soldier as a certain favorite. It would be too much to call any of these characters "evil" but as you ponder who among the morally vacuous cast is the "worst", you'll discover that your gaze turns inward, which is Ford's real achievement here.

Going backwards and forwards, the naïve narrator describes a world of selfish and deceitful people. And, as he says, those deceitful, normal people are the ones society is built on. Just like S. Maugham, Ford allies the typical English irony with the superb French writing style. An excellent reading.

Besides having one of the cooler names ever (despite, uh, Ford Hermann Hueffer being the real one), I can't help but admire the discipline of Ford's writing. DeLillo started his graduate studies centered around Ford, only to realize that he didn't much care for him one way or another. What's that to do with this? I have no idea; I have a headache.

Damn fine novel.