About half through this and I don't really get it. Thackery has wit enough, but the prose falls too flat to deliver it. Melville proved that clause-dense English could jive; Joyce (in the Bloom chapters) that choppy could fly like a kite; Dickens is ample proof that satire of the era still plays. But Thackery just isn't registering with me. Does it get better? (recent chapters have improved some - married couples about to go to Belgium) Am I just retarded? (dime for every post says this)
Plot-wise seems like what would've happened if Gogol wrote War and Peace - but I'm not sure I can dig that either. Is there anything profound or deep in pure cynicism? The gestural (because unfinished) religious epiphany in Dead Souls struck me as far from a mistake and rather central to the book as art.
Vanity Fair general.
I'd self bump but apparently the self is a spook... So... Something bumps, anyway.
>prose
>>8230645
Recently read this, thought it was excellent.
You might just be retarded.
>>8231207
Anything in particular strike you as excellent or you just think that because the wiki said it was?
>>8231188
Thanks for your contribution. Good to see such vibrancy on what people mistakenly see as a wasteland for wannabe pseudo-intellectuals like Holden Caufield.