The Golden Bowl
A rich American art-collector & his daughter Maggie buy in for themselves & to their greater glory a beautiful young wife & a noble husband. They do not know that Charlotte & Prince Amerigo were formerly lovers, nor that on the eve of the Prince's marriage they had discovered, in an antique shop, a golden bowl with a secret flaw.
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5mentions
3people
2014–2024years
20% recommend20% neutral60% critical
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What Hacker News says
- In case people are interested, the Wells novel referenced in the piece, _Boon_, is available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34962/34962-h/34962-h.htm#fo...
It includes a pretty amusing mockery of Henry James's style, which is very very very inwardly focused:
> The gist is that Mr. Blandish wants a house to live in and that he has an idea of the kind of house he wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting, progressing chapter, expands and expands; it never jumps you forward, it never lets you off, you can’t skip and you can’t escape, until there comes at last a culminating distension of statement in which you realize more and more clearly, until you realize it with the unforgettable certainty of a thing long fought for and won at last, that Mr. Blandish has actually come upon the house and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a flash of lightning in a wilderness of troubled clouds, as vivid indeed as the loud, sonorous bursting of a long blown bladder, has said ‘This is it!’ On that ‘This is it’ my chapter ends, with an effect of enormous relief, with something of the beautiful serenity that follows a difficult parturition.
> “The story is born.
> “And then we leap forward to possession.
> “‘And here he was, in the warmest reality, in the very heart of the materialization of his dream——’ He has, in fact, got the house. For a year or so from its first accidental discovery he had done nothing but just covet the house; too fearful of an overwhelming disappointment even to make a definite inquiry as to its accessibility. But he has, you will gather, taken apartments in the neighbourhood, thither he visits frequently, and almost every day when he walks abroad the coveted house draws him. It is in a little seaside place on the east coast, and the only available walks are along the shore or inland across the golf-links. Either path offers tempting digressions towards it. He comes to know it from a hundred aspects and under a thousand conditions of light and atmosphere….
Henry James's _The Golden Bowl_ and a few other of his late novels are kind of a miracle of art, as in it's miraculous that they exist and nothing else really resembles them outside of maybe Proust!
- Odd. I wasn't crazy about The Corrections, but it struck me as straightforward reading. Moby Dick, The Man Without Qualities, and Don Quixote are long, but to my notion very readable in a way that Remembrance of Things Past or The Golden Bowl are not.
- Other difficult books, in a somewhat increasing order of difficulty:
0) The autumn of the patriarch, by Marquez
1) Gormenghast series, by Mervyn Peake
2) The third period of Henry James (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl).
3) The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch
I do suggest trying Gormenghast, it's an amazingly written fantasy series.
- Naughty you. I confess that a) I have never been able to fight my way through The Golden Bowl or The Wings of the Dove, and that b) I can't imagine that life, let only leisure, is long enough for 140 volumes of Henry James's letter. Also, I wonder who in the world one would impress by reading them.
- The YA debate strikes me as somewhat orthogonal to what Scott was writing of. I must say that while I find middle and early James very readable, I have tried and failed more than once to read any distance into The Golden Bowl or The Wings of the Dove.
