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Book Review: Gone to Earth
Jul. 11th, 2013 12:07 amCherries fell in the orchard with the same rich monotony, the same fatality, as drops of blood. They lay under the fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly and enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet’s heart.
There you have Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth in a nutshell: overblown, melodramatic, but so over-the-top in its ominousness that it works a grim and despairing spell. You don’t want to go on, and yet, like Hazel, you must; a mysterious force compels you.
( At any rate, I feel compelled to summarize, because WTF is up with this book )
***
In case you were wondering, I read this book because it is on the list of books that the librarian Mrs. Phelps recommended to Matilda (of Roald Dahl’s Matilda) when Matilda was but a four-year-old.
This list also contains Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I am wondering why Mrs. Phelps felt that Matilda, however brilliant, ought to read all these chronicles of sexual dishonor and misery at the age of four, and whether this had a deleterious effect on Matilda’s future relationships with men.
There you have Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth in a nutshell: overblown, melodramatic, but so over-the-top in its ominousness that it works a grim and despairing spell. You don’t want to go on, and yet, like Hazel, you must; a mysterious force compels you.
( At any rate, I feel compelled to summarize, because WTF is up with this book )
***
In case you were wondering, I read this book because it is on the list of books that the librarian Mrs. Phelps recommended to Matilda (of Roald Dahl’s Matilda) when Matilda was but a four-year-old.
This list also contains Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I am wondering why Mrs. Phelps felt that Matilda, however brilliant, ought to read all these chronicles of sexual dishonor and misery at the age of four, and whether this had a deleterious effect on Matilda’s future relationships with men.
