Collins Classics: The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (Collins Classics) (Paperback)

from JVioland

An impressionistic work of English life right before the outbreak of WWI. Told in a series of flash-backs, it skips around and is nonchronological. Somewhat difficult to read, but worthwhile. You get different views of the "good" soldier and two Americans, each of whom are married. It has twists....

from roblong

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard." - nice first line. A wealthy American spends time in Europe with his ill wife, and they befriend the Ashburnhams, a couple of similar age who appear to be more or less perfect. They aren't of course, nothing and nobody in the book is. What they actua...

from feelinglistless

Writing in the literary appropriation of impressionism pioneered by his erstwhile friend Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford's modernist narrative is an enemy of structure and coherence as it mimics his American narrator Dowell's memory of his obsessive psycho-sexual relationships with his suicidal wi...

from brenzi

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard." So begins the 1915 novel by Ford Maddox Ford, a book that even he, ten years after its publication, was surprised by the combined intricacies of voice and non-linear construction that make this narrative confusing and just a bit odd. But dang, it see...

from Dorritt

Ford Madox Ford begins the tale with the words "This is the saddest story I have ever heard," which is a little nervy, I think - kind of like Babe Ruth stepping up to the plate and calling his shot. As if that weren't enough, FMF "doubles down" in the preface to the version I read, explaining tha...