The Golden Bowl — Complete Kindle Edition

Back in the early 1970s when Masterpiece Theater was new on PBS and unlike anything else on TV at that time, they did a series dramatizing Henry James' "Golden Bowl". It was visually stunning. I was young and newly married at the time and found it mesmerizing. Alistair Cooke introduced it by saying that "nothing happens" but of course everything does. No one says what is on his/her mind - just long silences. Since Amazon is so kind as to make these classics free, I have been going through some of James' work and decided to try this one. I was in for something of a surprise as it is very difficult reading. I kept grasping for the dialogue to see if things would move along but it is mostly quiet tension. The plot is actually quite magnificent but it moves at a snail's pace. Nevertheless I could not put it down as I had to find out where it was going (I had completely forgotten what happened in the series 40 years ago). So very little actually happens but it does resolve so read on! I won't give away much of the story except to say that a very wealthy American marries off his adored to daughter to an impoverished Italian prince, but father and daughter remain a very close couple. Into this family unit comes a beautiful young woman, an old friend of the daughter, who eventually marries the father. The drama occurs because this young woman once was a lover of the prince and now the four of them become a close family unit. The tension builds.After reading the book I wanted to see the old series again and looked it up on Netflix. They had a movie from 2000 that was pretty bad. In order to put some movement into this very quiet story the movie resorted to maudlin flashbacks to history in the prince's family (adultery between a son and his father's wife) but they did keep most of the dialogue. However Netflix also still has the old Masterpiece Theater series and it is just as visually beautiful as it was 40 years ago and it is so much more faithful to Henry James. In order to get some movement it uses a narrator but he fits in perfectly. The only problem is I don't think the Netflix DVD fits in all the episodes and so I reported that to them. But it is still worthwhile after you have read the book.I believe that this is the more abstruse of James's work but well worth the effort.

I question my own tenacity this time: I start a book, I finish it. I like Henry James, sometimes I just love him but not this time. Interesting situation here and admirable characters Maggie and Adam but way too much verbiage, I groaned and groaned at some of these sentences. Talk about work to read a book- mercy but I am glad I 'm finished and I will skip The Ambassadors. in fact. I've read as much Henry James as I will ever read. I'm old, I have too many other good books to experience and I desire to leave him in peace.

I was exasperated at his arthritic syntax - a sign of age?

While the storyline is intriguing, the reading was more often painful than not, not least because the sentences were too long and the syntax was not correct so many times. It took me months to finish reading the book. Also, I wish the book offered more insight as to the Prince's character and thoughts.

Henry James is a master.

Henry James pulls no punches. You must attend to every word - and while this may seem a chore, the payoff is well worth the effort!

After reading about Henry James in the Donna Leon series, I keep trying to enjoy him. The Golden Bowl gets good reviews in Amazon, but I'm still not convinced. Have to keep trying to enjoy him, I guess.

This is a very slow read and it was far too mannered for my taste. The Kindle formatting is decent for a free version, no major errors.

The Reader had always loved LITERATURE; syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, structure, plot, characterization – in fine, all those things that MADE the laying of ink on paper good. At the soiree of his friends, the Assbackwards, he had overheard the dazzling young dowager Duchess Purina confess, in faultless Church Latin, that she found herself incapable, without – after revitalizing her body with the freshest, dew-picked, mist-blessed, hand-rolled, bone-china-cosseted tasse de thé (milk first) – having refreshed her mind with a reading from Henry James' masterwork, The Golden Bowl, leaving the house. The novel seemed to her, almost TOO perfect in its longueur. He had wasted no time in acquiring a first edition; from the hunched Levantine dealeress at the Bloomsbury nightstand. Now, as his hand languidly dandled the exquisite, hand-tooled Roget's, which he read in its place to forget, he was forced, in fine, to reflect that his Classical education – however well-rounded – had, on that occasion, proved more of a burden than the blessing it had seemed in the long-ago classrooms, halls, corridors and supply cupboard of Dr Arnold.

This one took me forever: I read it on and off, but that's because it's hard reading. Henry James engineers mighty sentences so perfect that you could drive a train over them, but the pace of his tale makes glaciers look frantic.The saintly Maggie and her rich, successful father are devoted to each other. They meet a Prince in Italy to whom Maggie becomes engaged. By coincidence, he's had a past affair with Maggie's friend Charlotte. The love triangle develops into a love quad-wrangle, aided by everybody's confidante, society busybody Mrs Assingham, and her pricelessly irascible husband.A couple more sentences would suffice to convey the entire 'plot', but then this novel is not intended as a twisty thriller - or not in the conventional manner. Prefiguring stream-of-consciousness writing, James reports each focal character's every thought, with intricate psychological nuance and immaculate precision. Without a single unconsidered word, he tells the least amount of story in the greatest possible time. It's an unquestionably impressive feat, but I fear it lacks mass-market appeal...Yet if you can keep chewing it is strangely gripping in its own way. For all that characters think and say, it is what hangs unsaid between them that fascinates them and us, as every conversation is conducted round the corners of the ever-inflating elephant in the room. Decide for yourself if you fancy tackling prose like this:------------Her father had asked her, three days later, in an interval of calm, how she was affected, in the light of their reappearance and of their now perhaps richer fruition, by Dotty and Kitty, and by the once formidable Mrs. Rance; and the consequence of this inquiry had been, for the pair, just such another stroll together, away from the rest of the party and off into the park, as had asserted its need to them on the occasion of the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends—that of their long talk, on a sequestered bench beneath one of the great trees, when the particular question had come up for them the then purblind discussion of which, at their enjoyed leisure, Maggie had formed the habit of regarding as the "first beginning" of their present situation.------------And if you're happy to overlook this:------------...the vendor of the golden bowl had acted on a scruple rare enough in vendors of any class, and almost unprecedented in the thrifty children of Israel.------------Or vulgar enough to snigger with me at:------------...the conscious quaintness of her ricketty "growler".

This was the last novel that Henry James himself ever completed. He did collaborate with others after this but was never to finish another novel. This book has always been met with a mixed reception by critics, and if you are coming to James for the first time then this is definitely not the book to start with. James once again goes back to his theme of Old World 'wisdom' meets New World 'innocence', but in this case with regards to marriage. As usual, if you strip the novel back to it's very basics you will realise that James' plots in and of themselves are quite simple, it is what he does with them that is the magic.Maggie Verver and her father, both American rely on each other to the total exclusion of others, but as they are both getting married to Old World partners will this change? What they don't know as they are getting married is that their partners are very good friends already.As the story unfolds we can see how people can ignore what is in plain sight under their very noses, and how innocence can contribute to problems. Ultimately this is a book about marriage, infidelity and how to try and keep a marriage working; an age old story that we have either experienced ourselves, or know of others who have had problems. This doesn't really fall into James at his very best, but is still way above what other writers can achieve.

Indeed sad, full of regrets, jealousy and misdemeanour. Though enjoyed most of James's novels, I was disappointed this time. The characters of Maggie and Charlotte ...both lost in their separate desolate state of personal reality began to grate. Whilst the Prince swanned around in a smug cloud of apparent benevolence. Poor Daddy had no chance from the outset with his child bride, though managed to hang on regardless. But the Eternal Triangle, is such a cliche that inevitably, they all fell down...

Late James (1904) and shifts between dense, even impenetrable, passages and thrilling scenes of dialogue and confrontation. This revisits the love triangles that occupy James in books like The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove but now the triangle is finally stabilised as a square.Very elegant, very complex: the characters might not have quite the pull of Isabel Archer or the extraordinary Kate Croy, but this is an absorbing read all the same.