29 January 2015

Review #136: Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy



My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”
                                                              ---- Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy, an English author, spun a spectacular and classic tale of love, Far from the Madding Crowd whose movie adaption is going to release in the month of May, starring Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaerts, Tom Sturridge and Michael Sheen.

Synopsis:
The first of Thomas Hardy’s great novels, Far From the Madding Crowd established the author as one of Britain’s foremost writers. It also introduced readers to Wessex, an imaginary county in southwestern England that served as the pastoral setting for many of the author’s later works.
It tells the story of beautiful Bathsheba Everdene, a fiercely independent woman who inherits a farm and decides to run it herself. She rejects a marriage proposal from Gabriel Oak, a loyal man who takes a job on her farm after losing his own in an unfortunate accident. He is forced to watch as Bathsheba mischievously flirts with her neighbor, Mr. Boldwood, unleashing a passionate obsession deep within the reserved man. But both suitors are soon eclipsed by the arrival of the dashing soldier, Frank Troy, who falls in love with Bathsheba even though he’s still smitten with another woman. His reckless presence at the farm drives Boldwood mad with jealousy, and sets off a dramatic chain of events that leads to both murder and marriage.
A delicately woven tale of unrequited love and regret, Far from the Madding Crowd is also an unforgettable portrait of a rural culture that, by Hardy’s lifetime, had become threatened with extinction at the hands of ruthless industrialization.



Oh well, I rarely involve myself into such a classic read! And surprisingly, classics can be devoured at any time and at any age. This is the story of farm woman named, Bathsheba Everdene and her choices of love and life, set across a beautiful countryside and lush green pasture, Wessex. It is not like any other regular love stories, instead it's unusualness is the key that drags us with it's flow. There is a love-square between Bathsheba, Gabriel, Mr. Boldwood and Frank set in the idyllic backdrop of an English countryside in the 19th century. But the story doesn't only revolve around Bathsheba and her lovers, instead, Hardy has captured the delicacy of human nature with intricate detailing and has also portrayed the beauty of nature in a very vivid manner. This book took me more than 5 days to finish reading it, not because of the usage of difficult words, but because of the beauty underlying in each and every words of this author.

“The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigor of the resolution itself. It is often flung out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst strong, required no enunciation to prove it so.”

Inspiring and thought-provoking lines, will only want you to fall deeper into it's depth.

I know most people have read this book quite a long time ago, but as I said it's never too late to read a classic novel, and moreover, it's movie adaption is soon going to hit the screens in the month of May, featuring, Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaerts, Tom Sturridge and Michael Sheen.

Anyways, what arrested me was Hardy has layered his narrative tone with profound humor.

“Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.”

The story has a lot of layers of mysteries and the author has thrown in twists and turns here and there to make the puzzle more intriguing, thus it will always keep us on our edges. The author painted each suitors with diverse taste and with their overview, simultaneously giving us an opportunity to look and judge them with our very own perspective. But whatever the author accounted about love and marriage are very real and true, though each and every relationship depicted in the book are flawed and faulty, but their flaws is what made their relationship look more realistic!

The characters speak their mind and provided the time period, we can still very much relate to each and every one of them, especially Bathsheba- she is the definition of any 21st century woman, but it's quite astounding to see that Bathsheba belongs to the 19th century timeline. Yet, some felt, Bathsheba as one of the most strongest heroine in the history of literature, I believe Bathsheba was quite depressed and a little insecure with life. Her independence and her talking mannerism are the only things that made her stand out in the crowd. But the way the author portrayed them in their book simply entranced my mind- each and every one of their feelings to movements to reactions are carefully noted down and explained by the author, maybe that's what made them so vulnerable yet so interesting to read about.

I believe Far from the Madding Crowd is such a book whose aura can never lose it's charm and something so extraordinary that no one in the world can ever truly re-create Thomas Hardy's flair.

Verdict: If you have not read this book, then you're missing out one of the most beautiful novels in the world of literature. And it was worth every penny! 
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Author Info:
Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his facination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.
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