Reviews for Wings of the Dove: A Norton Critical Edition

The average rating for Wings of the Dove: A Norton Critical Edition based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-12 00:00:00 Miroslaw Samulnik THE WINGED GRADATION I have been a devotee of Henry James for a while now. But this novel has overflowed me. So far this is the most Jamesian writing I have read. May be The Ambassadors is of the same tone and texture, and I would like to immerse myself in it too. Anyway, reading this was like listening to a lullaby that would drag you into a lethargic mood in the early hours of the afternoon. Not a sign of boredom, just a state of undefined bliss. Following James' account one is pulled into a blurred consciousness, with those veiled descriptions, faint thoughts, dim suggestions, subtle observations, foggy ethical dilemmas, equivocal dialogues.... It is with this succession of washes that a picture begins to emerge even if upon closing the book one wonders if one has been staring at the reflections of the Venetian lagoon rather than deciphering black graphics on a white page. No, his writing has no defined contours and his exploration of the referentiality of language is pulled to its tight extremes, for example, with the way he spins and stretches personal pronouns... the 'she' and the 'she', the 'her' and the 'her', the 'you' or the 'I', or is it the 'I' and the 'you'?. All these shifting identities at times perform an interrelated dance in front of multiple mirrors that confound the illusion with the tangible or verifiable, and we remain on a state of surmising. James ability to explore the malleability of language is also seen in his widened used of some terms, however simple these may be. Never before have I felt so bewildered by the word 'beautiful' used in differing semantic placements. With James it could refer to awareness, or to money, or to intelligence, or to subtlety, or to health, or to consideration. Also to beauty. For me then, in this novel, James writing takes a much higher flight than I had been able to survey before. For winged it certainly is.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-21 00:00:00 Alexandros Ioannidis Soooo you guys, I think missed that day in English Lit 101 when we talked about Henry James, because to me he's always been one of those authors you merely know OF, and who is important in some vague way but you couldn't possibly say how, who is not really relevant in our 3G world except for the fact that Merchant Ivory makes mad bank off of this lace-petticoat-and-social-graces kind of thing. But for serious you guys, why did no one never tell me that Henry James is a GENIUS?! I mean, why is this not more widely discussed? Like how after reading him you can never look at a conversation in the same way because he is absolutely devastating in creating and describing and codifying how a mood can shift from sentence to sentence, how he who actually walks you from glance to glance? Like how the plot of this book, so languid to start, coils you into a tighter and tighter spring up until the very last sentence? Like how he doesn't so much describe things themselves as describe the light that falls on them, how it's not just what his characters say but what they don't, and how he's totally bitchin' at telling you about the silences? I mean, really: "Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as it gave - her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music." This is just one of many, many passages that I wanted to rip out and rub all over my body. It is also one of many, many passages that took me about three readings to understand. This is one of the most difficult books I've ever read - I am depleted; I feel like I've been lobotomized circa 1906. I can't even begin to quantify the absolutely brick-like character of this text - though homeboy loves commas and sub-sub-clauses like nobody's business - but I have also never read a "difficult" book or a "classic" that is so sentence-for-sentence rewarding as this one. I want to write a check to the estate of this man. I can't even ridicule the really pretentious critical edition with douchbaggery essays titled like "Henry James: Art and Thought" because dear god, I give - I GET it. Henry James is a genius.