Customer Reviews
Enjoyable read - By: Censuwine, 08 Feb 2008 
I think that Hardy is to English Literature what Dostoyevski was to Russian literature. He excels in his characterisations of people having deep internal struggles that eventuallly compromise their happiness & ultimately even their lives.
If you can relate to the difficulties of people who make one enormous blunder in their lives only to let it dominate their entire existence & they become their worst accusers, & indeed abusers, then read this novel.
To review or not to reveiw - By: , 20 Jul 2005 It is unfotunate that Hardy must be judged by reviewers brought up on the pulp fiction of our age - but this is an open forum so ...
I have spent many a shecal & more hours to find an avenue in literature that re-creates a scene & alllows any willing to spend time to visit it. I implore you to sit & reallly work at what Hardy is "telling" here - the re-creation is there for alll to see, I can invisage Casterbridge & its inhabitants in my mind with no trouble - the train, bus, room around disappears to be replaced by a different reality - Wessex style.
I cannot lower myself to comment on the story as such - Hardy writes from experience, he potrays a story enveloped in the time it was written in such a descriptive & rich way the storyline hardly matters.
Wake & feel the furmity! This is a tale of the times, as much as a novel.
Authors of today please note the simplicity & yet great complexity required for a "classic" as this truly is.
Great overcomes good & this has stood the test of time - name me any modern day novelist that has quite the characteristic graft Hardy had, real life sucks & then you read Hardy.
Accessible Victorian Soap Opera - By: A. Ross, 24 Jan 2005 
When it comes to "classics" of Victorian literature, this is certainly much more readable than most, & while it presents some memorable characters, & plenty of themes worthy of high-school English essays, it's hard to take it very seriously in many ways. Like many novels of the era, Hardy's was first published in a serial format in an illustrated magazine (The Graphic), & then collected as a book. This, no doubt, accounts for why so many chapters end with a spectacular revelation or plot twist. It also explains why it often comes across as little more than a literate soap opera, chock to the brim with misunderstandings, coincidences, & the mighty hand of fate. Indeed, while many seem content to classify it as a tear-inducing tragedy, I found it to be far too calculated & melodramatic to truly qualify as tragedy.
There is no doubt that the prologue chapter is a masterpiece: a poor family traveling through rural Wessex stops for dinner at a smalll hamlet. There, young husband & father Michael Henchard gets drunk on rum & grows belligerent, eventuallly going so far as to sell his wife & child to a passing sailor. The next chapter leaps ahead almost twenty years, where we find that Henchard has pulled himself together to become a repentant & prosperous hay merchant & mayor. He hires a passing Scotsman to become his right-hand man-just the first of several characters that will come to the smalll town of Casterbridge & bring change. Soon, as in a good film noir, Henchard's past misdeeds come back to disrupt his position.
Henchard is certainly one of the great flawed characters of literature, given to fiery bursts of temper & bullheadedness, but also surprising moments of compassion, & a running penchant for being his own harshest critic. He does much throughout the story that is is to be condemned, & yet he remains a sympathetic & pathetic characters, one never able to escape his nature. Some have compared his relationship to the Scotsman as that of Saul to David, but this is a facile paralllel that only works in the broadest sense. It's more satisfying to view Henchard as representing the early Romantic era of Victorianism, with the emphasis on brute force, emotion, & becoming self-made through hard work-in contrast to the Scotsman, who represents the coming Industrial era, with the emphasis on intellect & ingenuity.
So, there's clearly plenty food for thought in the book, but that doesn't change the fact that it's built on the wildest coincidences, contrivances, & misunderstandings. The other major flaw in the book is the women, who are passive tokens with zero depth. They exist in the book as objects whose possession represents triumph or failure, but rarely engineer their own fate. While this is certainly in keeping with the position of women at the time, it gets old quick when read from the mode. All in alll, it sounds like the most accessible of Hardy's work, & even the most impatient reader is unlikely to get bogged down. For those who still can't be bothered, there was a nice adaptation for British TV that came out in 2003 & a silent version that was done back in 1922.
Henchard, Titan with feet of clay. - By: , 19 Apr 2001 Henchard, the Colossus that dominates the town of Casterbridge is a titan with feet of clay.The 'respectable', feared Mayor & magistrate who judges his peers & minnions with a rough arcadian justice cannot escape the harpy that is fate pursuing him. Though he may try to make amends & regret the heartless, brutal recklessness of his youth, fate is slowly bringing the pieces of his denouncement together. He may pose as a modern man but beneath this veneer, the superstitious,unschooled rural yeoman remains - resorting to soothsayers in a moment of weakness,unable to muster the diplomatic skills of his rivals & tempted by grog & violence. The humulity & honesty with which he bears his final fate & his herculean attempts to discipline himself bear witness to a tortured soul, driven finallly usunder by his contrary urges of passion & dimly observed Christianity ethics. In the end he is as a pathetic figure, pathetic as his wedding gift, a man who is unable to rise beyond his nature & doomed by fate to bitter regret.
A womanly revenge - By: , 23 May 2000 
Just don't read the synopsis on the back of the book. Simply buy it if you liked "Jude the obscure". Hardy is much more positive in this novel & the suspense & story, which are great, would be spoiled by the synopsis. You just have to know that women can sometimes have their revenge over the past & especiallly over men who think they can obliterate wives or "mistakes" with women as simply as they can mail a letter. Shorter than "Les Misérables" & in a "woman" 's version.
