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Notes -
Finished Pride & Prejudice yesterday. I was expecting crisp and refined writing but what I got, which certainly was not parallel to, indeed not sharing many aspects with, a style one could generously, or as befits opinion parsimoniously, describe using a range of terms, carefully chusen from the refracted, diffuse spectrum of all potential lexical motifs, as one of focus, indeed moreso not an under abundance of sidewards steps and circumlocution.
Better than Madame Bovary though.
I’ve never opened Pride & Prejudice, but I did attempt Sense & Sensibility and my impression was similarly unfavorable. Austen was indeed a keen observer of human psychology, but her elliptical prose style left me cold. (And I say this as someone whose writing style is not exactly a paragon of Hemingway-esque brevity itself.)
Yeah, I don’t know if it was a particular quirk of hers or just the writing style of the time. But the way she just summarizes entire conversations without putting any of the dialog feels weird.
Seemed to me that there were many more significant sections written almost entirely in dialogue. Easily one of the most dialogue heavy books I've read.
It was a welcome relief toward the second half to read something like "he continued explaining the reason for his frustration until they arrived at the house". Felt like Austen herself was starting to show signs of getting tired of listening to her characters by that point.
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