Book description
Henry James's highly charged study of adultery, jealousy and possession, The Golden Bowl is edited with an introduction and notes by Ruth Bernard Yeazell in Penguin Classics.
Maggie Verver, a young American heiress, and her widowed father Adam, a billionaire collector of objets d'art, lead a life of wealth and…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Golden Bowl as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I had always heard that The Golden Bowl is one of the most difficult books in English literature. Now I’ve read it, and I can tell you that it is nowhere near as difficult as some other books, like the brain-rattling Tristram Shandy or Finnegans Wake.
But reading The Golden Bowl takes a lot of patience. It is steeped in metaphor, almost constant metaphor. James uses long, awkward, convoluted sentences with clauses and subordinate clauses. His characters’ thoughts are put through a CAT scan of analysis; each slice is examined under a microscope. But, he gives us page upon…
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