_quinnsreads's reviews
62 reviews

"Sometimes what’s wrong does not hurt at all, but rather
shines like a new moon."

This summed up the poignant feeling I had of reading dream work. I had been sleeping on Mary Oliver for a long time. Everybody kept telling me this one is a real deal. Wish I had read it during my previous years. 

It feels wrong rating this book 5. But I gave it 5 stars not because I liked how "dark and depressing" this book is but because I got caught up with the story. Reminds me how tragic human lives could end up in effect of unfavorable circumstances and the evils living among us. 

Wild. Didn't expect it to be so well-written. Buck Duane! The ultimate personification of fictional alpha male character. Pure hidden gem.

Depressing and simultaneously exasperating to read through. Reading the first few chapters of this book gives you nothing but boredom considering with all its repetitive narrating about the mundane lives of each of the characters followed by some descriptive writings about a brief background of a specific character which I thought was extraneous (at least in my opinion); set in the most rural life of France but in the perspective of bourgeois characters mostly. 
There is nothing particular about this book that I liked. I hated the characters. But partly felt pity for Charles who is the real victim here and his daughter Berthe (poor little one). With his nagging/ungrateful wife, Emma, who pursued the life of lies in search for happiness out of bore and discontentment, who led a silent extravagant life when with her lovers and gained only pure narcissism and sorrow and debts at the end of the book after spending too much for the agendas of her affairs is insufferable in the lens of literature. She doesn't know what she wants in life because her view of it was augmented by an irrational longing for meaning and unceasing,false joy that she was so fond of attaining.
This book isn't something you'd want to have in your 'favorite' list of books but is one of those classic realist novels you'll ever read because of its portrayal of life without speculative fiction and romanticism glued in the subject.