بالرغم من كرهي للرومانسية لكنني لم أستطع منع نفسي من الإعجاب بهذه الرواية. ما السبب؟ لا أعرف! أنا فقط أحببتها!

القصة كما يظهر من عنوانها تدور أحداثها في الأيام الاخيرة قبل فوران بركان فيزوف ليردم مدينة بومبي تحت الحمم اللافحة..

في هذه الأيام يرسم الكاتب صورة لحياة الانحلال التي سادت في تلك الفترة.. يقدم العديد من النماذج التي تراها صالحة في كل وقت و في كل مكان..

النخبة الثرية التي تغرق إلى أذنيها في الملذات..
طبقة العبيد التي تقوم بعمل كل شيء ولا تلقى إلا الفتات.. بل و أحيانا يقومون بدور مهرج السيرك في التسلية عن الطبقة الغنية عن طريق إلقائهم في حلبة مصارعة الأسود ليلقوا حتفهم وسط تهليل و تشجيع من أصحاب البطون الكبيرة..
بائعو الدين الذين يستخدمون الدين كتجارة للوصول إلى تلبية رغباتهم..
المتدينون الذين يصلون دائما للإله حتى ينقذهم من فساد البشر.. و لكنهم فعليا لا يقومون بعمل أي شيء لتغيير الحياة سوى الصلاة و التضرع..

إنها نماذج متعددة موجودة حتى الآن في أي مكان و زمان.. و أعتقد ان هذا ما أعجبني.. أنني شعرت بها "واقعية" بالفعل...

حتى علاقات الحب و التي كانت تحتل موقع الصدارة في أحداث الرواية فلا تشعر بها "فجة" و "مبتذلة" من عينة "هيبتا" و "أحببتك كما لا ينبغي" وأمثالهما من حب المراهقين.. بل هي علاقة حب عادية قد يمر بها أي شخص..

تعاطفت مع العديد من الشخصيات و كرهت العديد من الشخصيات...
تمنيت ان ينتصر الخير.. و كنت أشجعه بعواطفي..
حزنت للنهاية... ضايقتني قليلا.. كانت الحدث الوحيد غير الواقعي طوال أحداث الرواية.. أو قد يكون أنني كنت اتمنى نهاية أخرى.. لا أعرف..

و أخيرا.. كان هناك فيلما بنفس الاسم منذ وقت قريب .. كنت أظن انه اقتباس للرواية .. لكن لا.. إنهما قصتان مختلفتان.. لكن الرواية مع ذلك قد حولت إلى عدة أفلام سابقة..

I tried so very hard to like this book. I expected much more from it and was very disappointed. I wouldn't bother with it.

The Last Days of Pompeii has many of the attributes of a good bad book, and to curl up with a good bad book is one of the less complicated pleasures of life. It has a made-for-opera plot of thwarted love and vengeance, lots of hysterical drama and flashy special effects, and a pantomime villain of a villain. That may be junk food for the brain, but who doesn't like a little fat and sugar every now and again?

The Last Days of Pompeii has many of the attributes of a bad historical novel, and to curl up with a bad historical novel requires dubious taste and endless patience. It has heavy Victorian value judgements, a leaden insistence on explaining "authentic" detail, and lots of frankly unnecessary thee-ing and thou-ing. I really can't be having with any of that. The overall impression is of a group of Victorians in fancy dress wandering around a painstaking architectural reconstruction and overacting their little hearts out.

The question, then, is whether the horrors of the one succeed in dumping a bucket of damp sand over the fireworks of the other. And of course they do. The bad historical novel wins out. It's a shame because if you were to cut out all the lumpen bits - which from Bulwer Lytton's point of view would probably be to throw away the patient and keep the tumour - you'd have something where hysterical, overblown drama and lavish stage-sets are matched by the ludicrously overblown nature of the prose. An acquired taste, certainly, but a fine thing none the less.

As to Bulwer Lytton's style, which gets a lot of criticism: I don't mind it. I quite like a splash of purple swilling and swirling about in a sentence. I can cope with quite a lot of adjectival excess, particularly when I consider what lies at the other end of the spectrum - what I suppose you'd have to call red prose. Red prose would look a bit like this:

The man walked into the room. There was a gun on the table. He compared it to another gun. There were technical specifications. You did not read the technical specifications. Nobody reads the technical specifications. He picked up the gun. He was a man with a purpose.
A random Cockney cartwheeled through the room. This was local colour. He was in London.
All the sentences were like this. All the sentences were short. If a sentence was too long. It was broken into fragments. With full stops.

And that, I'm afraid, is truly unbearable. After a few paragraphs of red prose I long, yearn and reach lovingly for something with a few verbal frills. After a page of two of red prose I will freely forgive a man who cannot so much as open a window without flinging wide a broad and airy casement to admit a warm and gentle zephyr, dispelling thus the dim and noxious vapour of the night that hung about the clouded chamber like the memory of a time spent in the vain pursuit of pleasure... Or something similar.

It's actually rather a fun thing to do, to Bulwer-Lyttonize a sentence. You take a piece of red prose and lengthen and extend it by inserting the following (scoring system for anyone who cares to do this competitively):

Ornate vocabulary [1 point] - why use a simple word when there's a flowery one available?

The form (adjective) and (adjective) [1 point] - oh, he loves this. He can't put two adjectives together without using it, which is odd in places: a "bronze and equestrian" statue, for example.

The dread (noun) of (purpose) [2 points] - You meet this sort of thing in fantasy writing all the time - a cloak of invisibility, a ring of power, a wand of dissolution - but Bulwer Lytton likes it too. Witness a passage of egress, or a chamber of study. If you include a couch of rest then you've pushed into the ultraviolet prose of Amanda Ros McKittrick, so be warned.

Conclude with a value judgement or sententious sentiment [5 points].

... And then add up your Bulwer-Lytton score.

So I think, on the whole, that I'm not going to write Bulwer Lytton off completely, but that this one was not for me. Sorry.

"Dou ao mundo a sabedoria, guardo para mim a liberdade. Ilumino a existência dos outros, e gozo a minha." (p.46)

O melhor desta edição: a capa (o motivo que me levou a comprá-lo, porque não sabia nada sobre o livro, para além da sugestão do título);
O pior: as gralhas, sobretudo de pontuação.

É uma história sentimental e de aventura, um pouco "cliché" em momentos, com personagens um pouco planas (mas sempre há uma Nídia com algum dilema e por quem se gera simpatia), em que os bons são bons e salvar-se-ão, os maus são mesmo maus e perder-se-ão... A última parte, já com o Vesúvio em atividade exterior, é bastante interessante e o último parágrafo dá um toque metatextual muito curioso. Pode haver erros históricos e uma apologia cristã exagerada e até risível, mas, atendendo à época da escrita do romance (1834), tudo isso é compreensível. Entretém e está bem escrito, que é o que se pede, ao menos.
Muito popular �� época, rendeu várias adaptações ao teatro, ao cinema e à televisão e inspirou a estátua de Randolph Rogers "Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii" (1856).

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