Itemize Books To The Marriage Plot
| Original Title: | The Marriage Plot |
| ISBN: | 0374203059 (ISBN13: 9780374203054) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Madeleine Hanna, Leonard Bankhead, Mitchell Grammaticus |
| Literary Awards: | Indies Choice Book Award for Adult Fiction (2012), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (2011), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2012), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2011), Grand prix de l'héroïne Madame Figaro for Roman étranger (2013) |
Jeffrey Eugenides
Hardcover | Pages: 406 pages Rating: 3.44 | 109916 Users | 11334 Reviews
Mention Appertaining To Books The Marriage Plot
| Title | : | The Marriage Plot |
| Author | : | Jeffrey Eugenides |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 406 pages |
| Published | : | October 11th 2011 by Farrar Straus Giroux |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Contemporary. Literary Fiction. Romance. Novels. Audiobook. Literature |
Commentary Concering Books The Marriage Plot
It's the early 1980s - the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy - suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.Rating Appertaining To Books The Marriage Plot
Ratings: 3.44 From 109916 Users | 11334 ReviewsWrite Up Appertaining To Books The Marriage Plot
I only finished a quarter of this book before I had to return it to the library (express check-out). I think it should have been called The Marriage Plop. Granted, I'm no literary genius, just some schmuck with a science degree, so I don't get all the references, but beyond that I found each character hideously irritating and didn't really care how the story progressed or ended. The book club consensus was as follows: Some of us liked it, most of us didn't, but EVERYONE was disappointed.Ugh. This novel is asinine. It follows a group of pretentious people going around and being pretentious while talking about pretentious things and generally trying to get a reaction from my gag reflex. I mean at one point a character just takes "Finnegans Wake" out of their pocket, I mean seriously. I feel like the main point of this novel is just Eugenides shouting, "look how many books I've read!". It's rubbish of the highest degree. It also manages to be worse than Eugenides' other waste of
The experience was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure... But this particular novel, thank goodness, isn't at all like this. Its thoroughly affecting and modern, smart and hella funnyit has very few of those moments of nothingness,
I'm convinced this is what happens if you combine a Whit Stillman script, Franny and Zooey, and a whole lot of beige. There's some beautiful writing here, unfortunately there's equally lot of bland writing. It doesn't help that the characters are dull either. At times, I couldn't believe that this was nine years in the making...yet at the same time I could. Let's just say the writing has a certain over-wrought feel to it.Madeleine, the main heroine is a snooze. She's basically a stock dream girl
I am enjoying the marriage plot. Set in a college town in the Eighties, it appeals to those of us who majored in literature or did post grad studies. Madeleine's love life is often hilarious, sometimes sad. Eugenideswrites great satire. Here is an excerpt:"Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to
Definitely inferior to his two earlier bestsellers, The Virgin Suicides (4 stars) and Middlesex (3 stars) but I still liked this. It is still has that tongue-in-cheek, contemporary satirist prose of Eugenides. His playful words, the effective use of settings to heighten his scenes, his easy tone and light (generally) mood are all in this book. The revelation in the end is not as shocking as Virgin and there is no overbearingly strange character like the hermaphrodites in Middlesex here. However,
Masterful on many levels. At first I wasn't drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle - Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell. Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are. Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it. That's the way people are, and the way life goes. We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it's what happens nevertheless while we are furiously busy making other
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