I try to resist the urge to Livejournal this thread with whatever I'm reading for research/class, but if you have any stomach for 19th-century British novels at all, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss is the best coming-of-age novel of that period before Hardy. You know that special kind of agitation you feel when you agree with someone a little too hard? That pressure you can't figure out how to vent when someone puts into words things you've always felt but couldn't articulate? When it feels so close to what you've felt that it almost feels like it's you saying it? When the call is coming from inside the house? It's 400 pages of that feeling.
The way it insists on and reminds you of the intensity with which you felt all those little childhood reproaches--and theorizes why that was and why it and the pain of children you see now seems so distant and silly--was a constant source of a weird kind of pleasure + wanting to kind of throw up my feelings. And George Eliot's critique of the "man of maxim"--the guy who lets black-and-white bumper sticker doctrine govern his choices--is uncannily timely, but then it probably feels/felt/will feel that way no matter when it's read because that's how a work of art created by a genius works.
And the ending is the wild. I was warned it was the biggest surprise ending in Victorian literature. Even though its possibility is suggested a hundred times, the pace at which it happened was something I couldn't have prepared for.
Just a really weird and great book!
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