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I am a pretty avid lover of the the few Dickens books I have read, but I have to be honest in saying that I wasn't the biggest fan of this one. The plot centred around the title character who spends much of his time gallivanting around the country saving children from cruel orphanages, acting in theatre extravaganzas, pitting himself against his self-possessed uncle and saving his sister from an unwanted marriage. I found Nicholas' character unconvincing from the beginning and the storyline was a bit too good versus evil for my taste. The female characters had no real strong role to play it seemed, but just served as damsels in distress, so that Nicholas could eventually swoop to their rescue.
There were some interesting characters who surpassed the clear divide described above though. Newman Noggs sides himself with Nicholas and his family, but works as a clerk for Nicholas' evil uncle Ralph. We learn that despite Noggs' good intention, his judgment is often clouded by his addiction to alcohol which fuels his erratic behaviour. John Browdie who starts off disliking Nicholas also has a role to play. He is unaccustomed to the learned nobleness of Nicholas and his contemporaries and in him the reader is able to find some comic relief and a believable character. The book's weaknesses though come through more strongly in the weak female characters, the hometown hero and the evil characters where evil seems to be only for the sake of more evil.
Of the works by Dickens that I have read, I would far more recommend Bleak House or Oliver Twist, both of which have a more realistic depiction of the social commentary that made Dickens' work so famous.
This famous book spans over one hundred years and the generations of the Buendia family living in a jungle settlement in Colombia. A family tree at the beginning of the book helps the reader to keep track of the many almost-same-named characters and who they are in the scale of things. The Buendias appear from the beginning to have a rich history and the beginning of the book tells of how the (fictional) settlement of Macondo came to be.
The book also has a sort of magical view of time. The family is cyclical in operation. Indeed it seems that many people with the same names have similar attitudes and often similar fates. This appears to be Marquez's way of showing the destiny given to people by their very birth and this is highlighted by the demise of the many sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendia only after they are brought together in the discovery of their common father.
Many of the characters in this book, especially the male ones undergo periods of great despair and speculation and all the male characters starting with the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia seek out solitude in their different ways throughout periods of their lives. The women in the book are also given interesting characters, in particular Jose's wife who lives almost to the end of the book and who delivers some of the memorable dialogue about the fate of the family that comes through at the end. The women seem to be firm in their wants and desires unlike the men who almost seem to let emotion dictate their every move a little too much.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is full of blackish humour which perpetuates until the very end. I think it's a must-read for everyone.
This is an amazing book that I have wanted to read for ages, and have not seen the movie of despite the fact that I love Jack Nicholson. It details life inside a psychiatric ward under the tyrannical rule of Nurse Wratched who rules over the patients with a seemingly iron fist until a certain patient comes along.
The book is narrated by a half Indian patient, Chief Bromden, who clearly has hallucinations and delusions and this can be seen from the first pages. The Chief repeatedly speaks of what he knows as "The Combine", a huge overseer of all human interaction that demands conformity in society.
From the beginning, the patients in the hospital are divided by the Chief into "acutes" and "chronics". Acutes being the ones who have a chance of being cured, and the chronics who are viewed as being sick for life. The Nurse Ratched rules over them in such a way that she has them bringing out the worst of each other in what she deems group therapy meetings, if someone rebels they are sent for electroshock treatments or even lobotomies, even though the book was set in a time where both treatments had surpassed their heyday.
Randall Mcmurphy arrives and changes the place forever, signaling that he will not give into the Nurse's authority, and even persuading the doctor to rebel against her continuous demands. In a way McMurphy serves as a saviour in what seems like a whirlpool of human life and interaction that will never end. The book follows a series of events which show how power shifts between people and is an amazing display of perceived power versus actual power.
I won't give too much away in this book, because you truly have to read it to really understand the enormity of underlying themes and the powerful writing which is featured. I was amazed by what I experienced in this book and am now definitely going to see the movie, although my guess is it won't be as good as the book (I have yet to see a movie that is as good as a book).
