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Customer Review: The way of all flesh
Book is what my husband wanted. He read it when he was a young man. Just a review.
Customer Review: Scathing depiction of Victorian values
A slow, difficult read yet not without merit. At times scathing at others jocular yet always insightful.
The tale is of one Ernest Pontifex and 4 generations of his family beginning with his great-grandfather told by a family friend, Overton.
The reader is exposed to the hypocrisy of Victorian values inevitably consequential in the development of our protagonist and his overbearing bible thumping father.
Butler describes the twisted growth of the Pontifex family tree; one limb overshadowing the next letting it shrivel in darkness. One wonders whether the tree was planted outside the Munster residence.
At times I couldn't help but hate Ernest's father and reel in disbelief in Ernests' naivety. These conflicting emotions make the book enjoyable.
Product Description
Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood satirizes Victorian hypocrisy in its chronicle of the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex. Along the way, it offers a powerful indictment of 19th-century England's major institutions.
Customer Review: A fine depiction of the changin' times
There is nothing remarkable about the literary style of Butler's book; it reads like a million and a half other 19th century British novels. What distinguishes "The Way of All Flesh", however, is its honest and at times funny portrayal of Victorian society. With great wit, Butler's narrator, Overton, and main character, Ernest, expose the stuffy, staid, hypermannered, insipid Victorian middle-class mindset.
What is especially nice is that Butler doesn't take too many cheap shots. The characters here are very well-drawn. Ernest's father, Theobald, though clearly representing all that Butler seeks to skewer, is enough of a three-dimensional foil that I could feel some sympathy for the poor old man. (He's not evil incarnate, just a sorry product of his time.) The same goes for the rest of the supporting cast. I like the narrator's voice; it's distinctive and wry enough to be unique, but not so intrusive as to distract from the plot.
Parts of the novel are funny; parts seem to drag. I don't know that I liked the end of the novel--everything seems tied together a little too perfectly; but an explanation may be found in the fact that Butler did not edit this portion of the novel before his death.
This is a solid book. Give it a shot.
Customer Review: it's a grower...
it's a grower. it took me a long time to summon the patience to read further than the 50th page or so. it took far too long to get on with the story. when it did though, i begun to really enjoy the book. the characters are excellently portrayed, especially ernests parents. in my humble opinion, it is very well written. my only criticizm is the tendency of the narrator to go off on tangents, mainly at the beginning of the book
Customer Review: An evening spent with Butler is an evening well-spent
A rich, intelligent, historically informative masterpiece that tells the modern reader about the concerns, delusions, pretensions and prejudices of Englishmen of the 1700s and 1800s.
Much more than just a novel, this work offers Butler's opinions upon philosophy, child-rearing and religion. The events of the novel serve to illustrate and reinforce the points made. It is a hybrid, a novel/essay, and rare at that. More essayists should spice up their arguments by dressing them with vivid characters and a decent plot, as Butler has.
Rich in wit, satire, sarcasm, humor, insight, and not without flashes of bitterness and anger.
If you read only a hundred books in your lifetime, this would not be such a bad choice for the eightieth or eighty-first. Towers above most novels that cover this long period in history (some hundred years or so, spanning four or more generations).
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