Reviews for A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

The average rating for A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-01 00:00:00 Lcc C. May The Well Beloved is Hardy's last novel (or his penultimate, depending on how you count); and it has a distinctly elegiac, valedictory feel about it. The ostensible theme is beauty and the artist's'and lover's'desire to possess and appropriate it; but it is also about ageing and memory and the vanishing of youth. There is something of a presentiment of Proust about this novel, and I wasn't surprised to learn that Proust knew The Well Beloved and liked it. He has an interesting comment about it in a letter of 1910, which recognizes the thematic analogies between Hardy's work and his own: Je viens de lire une très belle chose qui ressemble malheureusement un tout petit peu … à ce que je fais: La Bien-Aimée de Thomas Hardy. Il n'y manqué même pas la légère part de grotesque qui s'attache aux grandes oeuvres. Proust has a point about the grotesque. Hardy's protagonist, Jocelyn Pearston (in the 1892 serialized version of the novel I read) or Jocelyn Pierston (in the 1897 revised book publication), pulls off the remarkable feat of falling in love successively with three generations of women in the same family with the same name, Avice Caro. Hardy manages the intrinsic farce of this situation well, at the same time that he works it for his deeper, philosophical themes ("Caro" means "flesh" in Latin, with all that implies.) When Jocelyn confesses to Avice Mark III that he has loved her grandmother and her mother prior to her, the girl asks sardonically whether he loved her great-grandmother as well. Incidentally, I feel no qualms about giving away aspects of this novel's'preposterous'plot, because plot is so little a part of it. It's less a realist novel than a symbolist poem; or, better, it's a strange mixture of the two. On the "symbolist poem" side of the equation, one thing I liked about the novel was its impressive philosophical density, and especially the interesting, highly self-conscious way in which it engages with the Platonic theme of idealized love as a groping after divine or immaterial beauty. On the "realist novel" side, I loved its portrayal of the tiny island, or peninsula, of Portland, off the Dorset coast: the ancestral home both of Jocelyn and the various Avices, and home also to the famous Portland stone, of which half the great monuments in London are built. Hardy portrays the tiny, fragile, vanishing island culture of Portland brilliantly, setting it off against the world of London drawing-rooms through which Jocelyn disaffectedly drifts. He yokes these worlds powerfully together through the detail of Jocelyn's profession as a sculptor, linking him on the one hand to matter'the stone that his father and grandfather quarried on Portland'and on the other to form: the vapid, ideal, sculptural images of beauty with which Jocelyn delights the polite London world. I thought of Michelangelo at points, reading this novel'both for his sculptural pursuit of beauty; and for his "grotesque"'or tragicomedic'real-life obsession with beautiful individuals, of which we catch glimpses in his poetry. Given Michelangelo's well-known incapacity, or unwillingness, to finish artistic works, it is poignant that Hardy found it so difficult to find closure with this novel. Apart from the 1897 revision'quite major and structural'he revised it again in 1903 and 1912. A more obvious parallel with The Well Beloved is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was published the year before the serial version of Hardy's novel, in 1891. A feature of Jocelyn's characterization that Hardy emphasizes is his unnatural youthfulness of appearance, well into middle age, reflecting his moral and emotional arrested development. The themes of the two novels are very close in some ways, although their plots have a very different arc. A final comparison: I noticed that one reviewer on this site mentions the thematic echoes of The Well Beloved in Christopher Nicholson's Winter, a fine biographical novel on Hardy's late life. I was struck by that as well. Nicholson is clearly in dialogue with The Well Beloved in ways that I hadn't realized when I read Winter a few years ago.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-03-22 00:00:00 Larry Caplan This was a bizarre little novel, following a sculptor on a lusty lifetime pursuit for his 'well-beloved'. This term describes, in essence, his ideal female partner and he, over the years, finds such a figure in three generations of women. The subject matter made me feel a little queasy to read about, as it never seemed challenged in any way. I understand the age of this book is largely the cause of this, but a modern-day reader will find much to negate in this pages, despite the protagonist enjoying nothing more than the idolisation of these women. Once the somewhat distasteful topic is overlooked and the story taken for what it is, it is actually an enjoyable one. The years flew quickly yet the novel never felt rushed. Hardy immerses the reader into the protagonist's head, which is a little initially disconcerting given his tendencies, but ultimately leads to a small measure of understanding as the novel winds down to a satisfying conclusion. I have started my journey with Hardy at the end of his life's work, but the writing exhibited here has me eager to retreat into other of his infamous, earlier publications.