Pride And Prejudice Book Review

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Actual Rating : 3.5 stars

There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is to hate everybody.”
“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is willfully to misunderstand them."

I want most importantly to state , before i go criticizing whatever , that Jane Austen is an author who had written something here that has this type of challenging ease , inimitable simplicity in her writing style that seems easily accomplished for the reader , Yet its difficult to be imitated in the fact of things . and that i think is why it has this so big a hype .

though I can think of no other reason , because this *rich arrogant guy likes not rich high spirited girl who then figures he's no arrogant but an introvert whose infact good at heart* is not a new story and its so very repetitive that it cant be the general outline of the story that gave the book this much admiration .

Aside from whatever everybody else thinks of this book , For me , it dragged too much in its first 30 percent that i was yawning my way through it . and this isn't very new to me as it always happened with the movie .

Every time i watched it , i was too annoyed by hypocrisy , by this literature perpetuates female obsession over nonsense and manipulative behavior in relationships , by Mrs. Bennet's behavior , by Darcy being such a snop and Elizabeth being a little dramatic . i would always quit somewhere on Mr. Bingley's departure from Hertfordshire .
I never knew for sure what would happen with these two but few days ago when i decided for the first time ever to finish watching it .
but as i crossed that threshold , all improved , things started to get better , i recognized that the hypocrisy that annoyed me the most was there from the beginning as the book's aim for it to be rejected at the end , that i had misjudged the story and Mr.Darcy and Elizabeth all together .

The end of the story had No loose ends, everything was packed into neat little boxes and squared away. a Hollywood end with couples married happy and rich .
but whatever , even with the fact that i have not such a big inclination for ends like this , i liked this one . because you'd end up recognizing Darcy, Bingley, and Elizabeth all totally throw away marriage matches based on socio-economic equality . as miss Darcy , miss De Brough and Mr. Collins .
we'd realize that we're being set up for a whole novel that beautifully questions the standard attitudes toward marriage and how society associate it with financial advantages .
and there is also the book's underlying theme of the falsehood of basing your opinions of someone on first impression .

So now lets clear this mess , from my jumble of thoughts i can see that ,
its a good book , with a decent dose of comic relief , subtle Romance and admirable main characters .
only two problems made it difficult to connect well to the story :

1-the third person omniscient narrator , the anonymous voice taking the credit of telling us whatever is happening , its not much entertaining . This third person view lends a cold dimension to the novel, in the sense that dialogue and events dominate the story rather than emotions .
thats why i usually prefer first person narrator from multiple POVs .
like For example, we are immediately told all we need to know about Darcy and Wickham at some point and that Elizabeth is judging these two men wrongly . we know nothing of Darcy's perspective but what he have told her in that letter .
and we hardly can say that even with the narrator following Elizabeth we had any better an idea about her inner conflicts .
If we had known , then we could have enjoyed watching her make her mistakes then learn to overcome them , rather than learning from events as she does .
i dont like to be trapped in the reality of things and the outer view of whatever is happening , its much better to let the readers dwell inside the characters heads , that would give them a better chance of connecting to them .

2-the language barrier :
when i felt very bored. It wasn't the fact that Austen had a terrible story line , but rather because its written with Old English it was difficult for me to understand. the sentences that could be beautiful ended up becoming difficult to decipher .
i had this very problem when i used to read Charles dickens novels in my school years , it would take a month or two to read one novel . but i didn't expect it here , maybe because i thought this is no dickens after all and the fact that my English had much improved since then . but still for those whom English is not a first language , Old English would still cause the stories to drag .


so with these two obstacles and a little misjudgment at the beginning , the story didn't go well with me , but still non of these has the nature of being permanent . i think if i read this again , maybe not now , lets say a year or so later i will find a whole new story hidden among the lines . i believe this book is multi-layered , you may find something new every time you re-read it .

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