In the first of today’s posts, I give you a bad review. Sorry, I try not to do it, and look for the positives, but I just struggled too much with this one!
Book 18 – The Beauties and the Furies, by Christina Stead. It is the mid 1930’s, and bored housewife Elvira Western leaves her London home to start a new life with her young lover Oliver in Paris. On the train to Paris she meets Annibale Marpurgo, and the lives of all three become inextricably linked in the seething Parisian atmosphere. However, as Elvira realises what she has left behind, and Oliver finds physical and emotional satisfaction with other women, the unknowable Marpurgo twists their fates with his malicious words.
This book sounded really interesting – challenging the morality of the time with adultery, prostitution, fraud, abortion, drunkenness and so on. However, and it’s a huge however for me, I disliked the writing style.
It is in parts verbose and overblown, dense to the point that your eye starts to slip over the surface of words. An example: ‘You’re a pure physical function, docile to your moons, appetites, secretions: you think to give your brain the little bit of exercise for which it was, by Lamarckian generations, fitted.’
It is not all like this, and this is not the worst bit, but 383 pages of this style was too much by far for me. It was so distracting that I am amazed I got all the way through to be honest!
Added to this a cast of selfish, thoughtless, sly and preposterous bores who had very little in the way of redeeming features and this book was not to my taste at all.
I am sure there will be people who enjoy it but if this is the writer at her ‘witty best’, as the cover suggests, I can’t imagine I’ll be reading any more of her work. It has a high goodreads rating based on a small selection of reviews though, so I guess if you enjoy it, you really enjoy it!
Happy reading,
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
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