I’m reading “Pride and prejudice” and I’m strangely enjoying it. I like the characters and the story, I’m really hooked with the book, but I don’t really know why it is so interesting and how Austen makes me feel interested in a book that, maybe just in the surface, is so mundane.
In the past, I also read “Sense and sensibility” for University and I also enjoyed it very much.
How do you think Austen makes this? How does she make a realistic and simple book so interesting in its story and its characters?
I have zero idea why you would use the adverb strangely here – literally millions of readers have enjoyed the novel and millions more will too; there’s nothing remotely strange about enjoying P&P.
Martin Amis, long before he was a writer, fell under the spell of the novel; he writes: "When I was introduced to the novel, at the age of 15, I read 20 pages and then besieged my stepmother’s study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth. (I needed to know that Bingley married Jane.) I needed this information as badly as I had ever needed anything.
“Pride and Prejudice suckers you. Amazingly—and, I believe, uniquely—it goes on suckering you. Even now, as I open the book, I feel the same tizzy of unsatisfied expectation, despite five or six rereadings. How can this be, when the genre itself guarantees consummation? The simple answer is that these lovers really are “made for each other”—by their creator. They are constructed for each other: interlocked for wedlock. Their marriage has to be.”
You are responding to a great plot, great wit, great prose–literally nothing strange about it.
I read “strangely” as for OP, meaning it’s different than most other books they read.
Me too. Also, “strangely” because it’s hard for them to describe what it is about the writing that makes it so fascinating.
“Strangely” because the synopsis of the book isn’t very catchy - “two people fall in love 200 years ago” as opposed to a genre like science fiction - “two people are trapped in a time bubble where they must harness the power of quantum snail mucous to escape… but which one of them is a clone of the other’s missing pet dog?”
I wonder why Amis didn’t just look at the end of the book
Damn i just got spoiled. I know its my fault for not having yet read it but pls put spoiler tag
Nope nope nope. These books are hundreds of years old. Don’t read a thread on Hamlet if you don’t want it spoiled. The Austen canon, particularly P&P is damn near Biblical in its ubiquity in the larger conversation of literature. This is like spoiling one of Aesop’s Fables.
True
THIS. It’s weirder that OP is so shocked that they like Austen’s work than anything. These books are good enough to be beloved a century later, why does OP think it’s ‘strange’ that they enjoy such classic, loved novels? It low key smacks of an edge of “wow I can’t believe this girly thing is actually good! Who knew! (Besides the millions of people that love the books enough to keep them and their adaptations popular, or the many lit courses that include them for study).”
The OP says they are strangely enjoying it, not that it’s strange to enjoy it. Meaning their level of enjoyment is unusual. I would have said “uniquely” or “peculiarly” instead of “strangely” but I get what they mean. Austen is absorbing in a way that only a masterpiece is. This is a common opinion, as you say, millions of readers agree. It’s fine to ask what it is about her books that make them that way.