I, Claudius by Robert Graves

If time travel ever becomes a reality, DO NOT travel back to ancient Rome -- unless you have a death wish, because according to this book, everyone in Rome is trying to kill everyone else.  I, Claudius is like the Sopranos, but with togas but no baked ziti (tomatoes didn't arrive until the 1500s).  First published in 1934, this is the story of Claudius, an unlikely Roman emperor who lived from 10 BC to 54 AD.   Claudius stuttered, walked with a limp, and was slightly deaf.  Not the first choice for an emperor, normally, but he basically escaped being assassinated like everyone else for that exact reason -- everyone treated him like an idiot, and he never seemed like a threat to anyone.  He kept his mouth shut and his ears open and managed to outlive most of his family, which is pretty amazing.

It's quite a fascinating read, but it took awhile -- I can only read about so many backstabbers (sometimes literally) and murderers and plotters, and then I have to take a break.   There was so much plotting and deception, I can't believe people carried on normal lives.  At one point, Claudius does mention that most of this craziness actually involved only several hundred people, and that four million Roman citizens were basically enjoying normal, productive lives -- it was just the senators and aristocracy and their wives that were all involved in this mayhem.

I liked this book but it took a lot longer than I expected.  It's 468 pages, which doesn't usually take me that long, but this book is not a fast read.  There's hardly any dialogue, and it's densely packed with historical facts and people, sometimes it just seemed like Roman history thinly disguised as fiction.  Graves does a lot of telling, and not showing.  I don't know if he was imitating the style of classical writers, but it did get a bit tiresome.

Bust of the actual Claudius from a museum in Naples, Italy.

It was also complicated because there are so many characters, I could hardly keep track of them all ; also, many of them share the same names; for example, Claudius starts out by referring to his father and grandfather, but he never mentions their first names because they're all named Tiberius Claudius something something.  I really wish I'd started a list of the characters and their relationships while I was reading it -- I definitely would have appreciated a family tree or appendix.

I really wish I'd gotten around to reading this last winter, before I actually visited Rome.  Sadly, I didn't have nearly enough time to see all the things I wanted, though the Colosseum was amazing, and we saw the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill as well.  I missed the Circus Maxims and the Appian Way, but we drove under an aqueduct before we even checked into the hotel.  There are ruins EVERYWHERE.

There's the Colosseum, just smack in the middle of Rome.  No big deal.

I have already requested the 1976 BBC miniseries, one of the most popular ever show here in the States on PBS.  Nothing says holiday fun like murderous backstabbing Romans, right? 

April Zola Reading Event

Fanda from Fanda Classic Lit and  O from Delaisse are hosting a Zola reading event!!  In honor of Zola's birthday, which is April 2, they are hosting Zoladdiction, which is basically a month of reading Zola.  Well, I love Zola, and I have several volumes waiting patiently on the TBR shelves -- how could I refuse?

You can find details here, but essentially, participants will read Zola's works and blog about them during the month of April.  There are three levels of participation, named in honor of three of his most famous heroines:

First level:  Maheude -- read one book 

Second level:  Gervaise -- read two or three books

Third level:  Nana -- read four or more books

As much as I'd love to read all Zola, all the time, I'm going to be realistic and commit to the second level, Gervaise -- I'm sure I can read two books by Zola in one month!

Currently, I have six unread works by Zola in my possession, so I'm going to try and read at least two of them:

The Ladies' Paradise -- sex and shopping!  The story of a department store, with some of the characters from Pot Bouille. 

The Debacle -- Zola's only historical novel, set during the Franco-Prussian War.  Said to be one of the most accurate depictions of war in literature. 

The Dream -- the story of a young orphan living in a world of dreams.  It sounds very different from the harsh realism of most Zola novels.

I won't actually be reading this in French.
But I really like this cover!

The Earth -- a rural novel, set in Provence.  I've heard it has parallels with King Lear.

Nana -- one of Zola's most famous works, the story of a high-class courtesan in Paris.  Nana is the daughter of Gervaise, the washerwoman in L'Assommoir.

The Masterpiece -- Zola's most autobiographical novel, about a tortured artist.  Supposedly Zola's childhood friend Paul Cezanne never spoke to Zola after the novel was published.

Well -- is anyone else signing up for Zoladdiction?  Which novels should I read?  What's your favorite Zola novel?

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Wow.  

East of Eden is one of the books I've had on my to-read list the longest, ever since I started on my quest to read more classics back in 2005.  Somehow, I managed to graduate from high school and college without reading a single word of Steinbeck.  When I started to read classics as an adult, I knew I'd finally have to read his books, and at first I was very apprehensive -- Grapes of Wrath sounded so dire.  But I joined an online classics group and one of the first books I read with the group was Travels with Charley, which I absolutely loved, so I became a Steinbeck convert.

I bought my copy of East of Eden at a library sale about four years ago, and I've packed and unpacked it in three different houses.  For about three years now, it's been the book I most wanted to read off my TBR shelves.  It was my daughter's assigned summer reading for her high school English class next year, so I decided to read it along with her.  And it was really worth it.  Why did I wait so long??  Was I saving the best Steinbeck for last?   

It's kind of hard to describe this book.  It's long and sprawling, and spans about 50 years, from just after the Civil War to World War I, and the story is covers American coast to coast  from New England to California.  Inspired by the Genesis stories of Cain and Abel and Adam and Eve, it's the story of the Trask family, about sibling rivalry and fathers and sons.  It also contains some of Steinbeck's best characters, including what is probably one of the most evil characters in American literature.  

Though it's Steinbeck's longest work at 600 pages long, I raced through it in just a few days.  The plot and the characters are really compelling.  It starts out with two half-brothers in New England, Adam and Charles Trask, who are competing for their father's love, living on a farm after the Civil War.  Just like Cain and Abel, their father favors one son over the other, and the less-beloved son takes his jealousy out on his brother.  

In this story, there are two sets of brothers, and love for a woman also fuels the rivalry.  I don't want to give too much away, but Steinbeck weaves together Biblical allusions and California history in a masterful way.  He also incorporates characters based on his own ancestors.  Adam Trask moves out to the Salinas Valley, where Steinbeck grew up.  There's a lot of local color with a delightful Irish family, the Hamiltons, and a faithful family servant, Mr. Lee, who starts out as a cook but becomes much more to the family, a tutor, nanny, and he's basically the one holding the family together after things start to fall apart.

I loved this book although I did find some flaws in it.  Steinbeck is pretty heavy-handed with the Biblical allusions -- not only are there two sets of brothers (with initials beginning with C and A) Steinbeck spends paragraphs with characters philosophizing about the Bible and Cain and Abel, just in case the reader didn't get it.  Also, Lee is sort of an amazing wise Oriental sage, spouting wisdom -- he's just too good to be true. But there is so much great stuff in the novel that I can overlook the parts that bothered me.  

After finishing it, I really wanted to discuss it with someone else who was reading it with me -- my daughter is plodding along with it, but there's so much in it that I don't think she'll understand; in fact, I'm not even sure why this was assigned to high school sophomores!  I really wish I had chosen this instead of Tortilla Flat for my library's book group -- it's longer, but there's so much more in it and it's so much better!  It's more than twice as long but it's a far superior novel.  If you're interested in Steinbeck at all, do yourself a favor and don't bother with the shorter works.  East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath are absolute masterpieces and everyone should read them at least once.  

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment." 

Of Human Bondage is one of the very first classics I ever read for pleasure, and I still love it.  I first read it when I was eighteen, a freshman in college.  It was forced upon me by a boy in my dorm, who lived down the hall and on whom I had an enormous crush.  He insisted I take it home over Christmas break and read it.  How could I refuse?  Well, I did end up loving the book, though things never worked out between the two of us.

Years later, I've read lots more classics for pleasure, including several by Maugham, but I never picked it up again -- I had so many other books I wanted to read!  It's actually been so long since I read it that I could barely remember the story any more.  I didn't even remember how it ended!   Finally, I decided it was time for a reread.  Last fall we nominated books for 2012 our classics group at the library, and I put this on my list -- I wanted so much to discuss it with other people!  Well, wouldn't you know it, things came up and I had to miss the discussion, but I couldn't resist reading the book again anyway (I also added it to my Classics Club and Chunkster Challenge lists).  And I am pleased to report that I still loved this book the second time around, maybe even more so than the first time.

For those who aren't familiar with the book, it's a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, loosely based on the life of the author W. Somerset Maugham.  (It's a long book, so I'll try to give the setup without too many spoilers). The main character is Philip Carey, a young man growing up with a clubfoot in the late Victorian period.  He's orphaned as a small boy and sent to live with his uncle, a strict vicar in a small town in Kent.  His aunt is kind but doesn't know much about raising children.  Philip is a bright boy but mostly bullied by his schoolmates because of his disability, and his teachers seem pretty heartless.

However, Philip is a bright boy, and when he's older, he goes off to boarding school, and his teachers expect great things of him.  His uncle expects him to go off to Oxford and then take orders, but Philip has doubts about religion.  Instead, he goes to Germany for a year to study before returning to England.  Philip has a small inheritance, and tries various professions. He spends two years as an art student in Paris before he realizes he'll never be anything but a mediocre artist, so he finally decides to follow in his late father's footsteps and become a doctor.

One fateful night in a cafe, Philip meets a waitress named Mildred, and it's the beginning of an obsessive relationship.  Mildred is really toxic, one of the most obnoxious characters I've ever met in literature.  The book deals with their relationship and Philip's personal growth along the way.   Will Philip marry this horrible woman?  Will she put him in the poorhouse with her greed?   "He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her.  He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other."

Bette Davis as Mildred and Leslie Howard as Philip in the 1934 film adaptation

This book is more than 600 pages, but I breezed through it in about five days.  I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen, though I did have to grit my teeth and power through a few times -- Mildred is so awful, I really wanted to reach into the book and throttle her!  And Philip deserved a few good smacks upside the head a couple of times too.  But I really did love this book.  Philip's personal journey is really interesting and I got really caught up with it emotionally, I was really on the edge of my seat.  And I found the writing to be just wonderful and insightful.  Apparently Maugham considered himself among the best of the second-rate writers, but I disagree.  I kept finding passages throughout the book that I loved, and kept marking them with sticky notes (since I hate writing in my books).

I also loved reading about Philip's year in Germany, and his attempts to be an artist.  A couple of times Philip mentions a stockbroker fellow who chucked it all to be an artist in the South Seas, which is obviously Paul Gauguin -- who shows up in his 1919 novel, The Moon and Sixpence -- another Maugham novel which I read years ago and have essentially forgotten.  I'll have to reread that one again as well.

Has anyone else read this book?  Did you love it as much as me?  Any more Maugham you can recommend?  And have any of you reread a favorite classic after a long period?  Did you still love it or was it just not the same?

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Welcome to my first post of A Victorian Celebration, hosted by Allie of A Literary Odyssey!   I hope you'll visit her website to see all the Victorians people are reading this summer.  I have a lot of Victorians to read and review, so I'm very excited about it.  I'll be posting all summer long and I'll even be hosting a giveaway of my own, so stay tuned.

On to my book review!  I'm slowly working my way through the novels of Charles Dickens, and with Our Mutual Friend I have finished eleven of his fourteen major completed novels.   It's the last novel Dickens completed before his death, and I was worried it wouldn't hold up to some of my other favorites.  To my delight, OMF is now among my favorites.

Without too many details for fear of spoilers, here's the setup of the novel:

One evening, a man named Gaffer and his daughter Lizzie are out on a boat on the Thames River, when they find a dead body.  Gaffer makes his living basically scrounging whatever he can find floating in the river (frequently, it turns out, from drowning victims).  It turns out this particular dead man is John Harmon, the heir to an enormous fortune.  Harmon had just returned from abroad to claim his inheritance, which came with the strict stipulation that he marry a particular young lady chosen by his father, and whom he had never met.  Instead, the inheritance now goes to Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, faithful servants to the wealthy Mr. Harmon, who made his fortune from garbage heaps.

Now that the Boffins are newly wealthy, a host of people with questionable motives start to circle like vultures, trying to get a piece of their wealth, including Mr. Wegg, a poet who is paid to read to Mr. Boffin; Mr. Rokesmith, his new secretary; and Bella Wilfer, the young lady who was the bride-to-be, now not quite a widow.   It also explores the murder of Harmon and the intertwining fates of the Gaffer family, who become linked with the Boffins and the mysterious case.  This book also includes romance, humor, and satire.

Like Martin Chuzzlewit, much of the plot is based on people's greed, though it's a very different story.  Like Bleak House, it's a murder mystery.  Typically for Dickens, the characters are a mix of the grotesque, the comic, and the angelic ingenues -- this time, there are three young ladies eligible for the part of Dickens' heroine, though I found two of the three much less irritating than Dickens' typical saintly young ladies.  I did end up loving several of the characters, and couldn't wait to find out what happened to them next.  I was lucky enough to get the Naxos audiobook version of this from my library, and listened to quite a bit of it in the car on the way to and from work.  However, I got so caught up in the story I also had a print copy going as well, because some days I just couldn't wait to find out what happened next.

I really enjoyed this novel, though like Dickens' later works, it does have a lot of intertwining plots and characters to keep track of -- at one point I started a list, and I think I lost count at about 40 characters.  There were a few side plots I didn't care much about, but I do believe if I knew more about English politics and history I would have appreciated them more -- they were mostly political satire about the workings of Parliament.

Years ago, in college, I passed up a chance to take a course on Dickens in favor of Tolstoy, simply because of the reading load -- I think there were three or four novels for Dickens, and when I added up the pages it was more than 2000 pages for an eleven week class (we were on quarters).  In the Tolstoy class, it was about 1300 pages for War and Peace and that was pretty much it.   I'd never read any Dickens and was so overwhelmed I chickened out and registered for Tolstoy instead.  I liked War and Peace but I'll always regret not taking Dickens when I had the chance.  

Well, I'm making up for it now.  I loved Our Mutual Friend, and it's now one of my favorite Dickens novels.  I only need to read three more before I've finished them all -- The Pickwick Papers; The Old Curiosity Shop; and Barnaby Rudge.  Then I'm going to read The Mystery of Edwin Drood and I'll have completed them all!

Classics Challenge: April Prompt

This month the April prompt for the Classics Challenge is to discuss book covers of classic novels.  Cover art is always fun, especially since there are so many editions of classic novels available.  I'm actually sort of in between classics at the moment -- I've just started reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, just about 20 pages in, so I can't say for sure yet whether the book accurately reflects the story or the characters.

Anyhow, there's quite a few choices available.  First, here's the edition I'm currently reading:

It doesn't tell us much about the story, but the pile of coins is intriguing -- it's about greed and inheritance, so it does tie in nicely with the book's themes.  I know a lot of people swear by Penguins but I'm very fond of Modern Library.  The print isn't too tiny and the pages are really nice and smooth, plus they're not enormously fat. The endnotes are usually good too.  I bought my copy at Borders a couple of years ago, before they went belly-up.

And here's the always-reliable Penguin classic edition:

The book starts out with a Thames boatman finding a body.  The moonlight and the eerie purple light make me think there's something creepy going on here, but doesn't give away too much.  Nice.

Lately I've been reading more Oxford World's Classics.  Their Zola editions are especially good, but I haven't read any of their Dickens editions.  Here's their edition of OMF:

It doesn't really tell me a lot -- I assume she's the standard Dickens ingenue, angelic, one-dimensional, and boring, though she does look a little worried.  She's pretty well dressed, so maybe she's in love with the financially struggling hero (I'm just assuming since I haven't discovered who the hero is yet, but the ingenue is nearly always in love with a guy who's having money problems.)

But this one by Wordsworth Classics is worse:

Who is this girl?  Is she the mutual friend of the title?  And what is she wearing?  Pretty sexy for a Victorian heroine with the bare shoulders -- doesn't strike me as the least bit accurate.  And the grey background is weird.  I've read a few Wordsworth Classics, they're not my favorite.

But finally, here's something much nicer by Vintage:

Vintage has come out with some really nice book covers for classics the last few years.  I especially like their editions of books by Elizabeth Gaskell.  This doesn't really give us much about the story but it's a really nice photo.  If I saw this in the store I would definitely pick it up and read the back cover, but sadly, that's unlikely since there's only one major bookstore in my town these days, and Our Mutual Friend is too obscure for them to carry on the shelves without a special order.  If I wanted this edition I'd have to order it online.  Of course, if I was shopping online, I might buy this copy just because the cover is so nice.  I don't think Vintage has endnotes or any introductions, however.  But if I was purchasing solely because of the cover image, this might be the winner.

Any other great covers I've missed?  What's your favorite classic book cover?  Not just Dickens, but any classic?

Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope

Finally!  I've had this book out from the library for weeks, probably since I finished Dr. Thorne in January.  Seriously.  I started a couple of chapters weeks ago and then didn't really read it until about a week ago.  Once I got started, I was really rolling and finished it in about five days.  I can hardly say that about Dickens!

This is the story of two families, the Luftons and the Robards.  Mark Robards, the son of a respected doctor, is the childhood friend of Ludovic Lufton, a young lord and the heir of Framley.  When Mark and Ludo are still young men, the living of the parsonage at Framley becomes available, so Lady Lufton, Ludovic's mother, gives it to Mark, basically setting him up with a good job for life at quite a young age.  She also finds him a nice wife, Fanny, the best friend of her daughter.

However, Robards is still very young and rather foolish.  He starts mixing with some of Lord Lufton's swanky friends, to the disapproval of Lufton's mother, his patroness.  One weekend Mark attends a house party with some mutual friends, to the very great disapproval of Lady Lufton.  She has the right idea -- Mark is persuaded by a rich spendthrift named Sowerby to co-sign an IOU for 400 pounds (which he, Mark, doesn't actually have).  According to the Trollope website, in today's dollars that's the equivalent of about $25,000.  (Yowza!)  Mark doesn't mention this to his wife, since Sowerby is convinced he's going to marry Miss Dunstable (the rich heiress previously introduced in Dr. Thorne) and he'll be able to make the debt good himself in a couple of months, and it won't cause Mark a bit of trouble.  Ha!  Of course nothing does as planned and Mark is on a downward spiral of debt when he never even used a penny of it for himself.  Following all this so far?

Meanwhile, Mark's father has died, and though this might have saved the day if there was any money to inherit, it adds a different wrinkle to the story.  Mark's charming younger sister Lucy comes to live at Framley Parsonage.  Though she's described as "little and brown," she's quite delightful, and his friend Lord Lufton starts to become friendly with her, to dismay of his mother.  Lady Lufton wants nothing more than for her son to marry Someone Of Consequence; money isn't an issue for the Luftons, like we saw with the Greshams in Dr. Thorne, but LL still wants her son to marry someone impressive.   She's jockeying to get him married off to Griselda Grantley, the daughter of Archdeacon Grantley from The Warden and Barchester Towers.  Griselda is beautiful and rich, but doesn't seem to have much personality.

Meanwhile, there's some political stuff that I found very confusing and honestly, I skimmed parts of it.  Trollope does tend to ramble on about politics, and since I don't know the history, it really meant nothing to me. (I suspect this might get worse when I start reading The Pallisers novels, many of which are in the 800-page range).   Essentially I think there was some kind of vote of no confidence in the current Parliament, and people were in and out of the government.  Plus, Sowerby is trying to get re-elected for Parliament, despite the fact that he's about to lose his estate and his shirt because of all his bad debts.

The best thing about this book was the relationships between the people at Framley Parsonage itself.  Lady Lufton is bossy, but not a monster, and Mark's wife Fanny and his sister Lucy are just wonderful characters.  For a Victorian novel, there's a lot of strong, admirable females -- it's mostly the male characters that are making complete asses of themselves.

At the end, naturally, it all works out and most everyone is happy.  That's another difference between Dickens and Trollope.  With Dickens, the main characters usually turn out all right, but people always die and it's more melodramatic and tragic.  Trollope is closer to Jane Austen in that the endings are fairly happy and the bad people usually get comeuppance.  At any rate, that's what's happening in the Barset series so far.

I did like this book but not quite as much as Dr. Thorne -- the kerfuffle over Lady Lufton and Lucy was sort of a repeat of the situation in Dr. Thorne, and some of the political stuff was sometimes boring.  However, it was definitely worth reading.  I have two more novels in the series left,  and they're both whoppers -- The Small House at Allington is about 700 pages, and The Last Chronicle of Barset is more than 800!  Still, I hope to get to them sometime this year.

Bloggers, has anyone else read the entire Barsetshire Chronicles?  Which did you like best?

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Well, I have finally finished this nearly 800-page doorstopper, and I have to say I am darn proud of myself -- especially since I finished the last 400 pages in just about a week.  Dickens sometimes takes awhile to get started, but once the story got rolling, I needed to finish it.  I have now finished ten of the sixteen major works by Charles Dickens.  Six more to go!

After struggling for weeks with the beginning of this book, it finally started to pick up and got interesting.  However, the title of this book is very misleading.  There are actually two Martin Chuzzlewits, and neither of them is really the main character.  Basically, it's a book about greed, and selfishness, and loyalty, be it to friends or family.  It's also about how terrible situations bring out the best and the worst in people.  There are funny characters, and grotesques, and the typical Victorian tropes of misunderstandings and unbelievable coincidences.  And it all ends up pretty well, though some people are much happier than others.

I'm not sure why this book is so obscure among the Dickens canon -- it's kind of uneven but it turned out to be a very enjoyable read.  Having read several Dickens now, I can see that it contains elements of both the earlier and the later novels -- it's picaresque like Nicholas Nickelby, yet it also has the beginnings of the multiple storylines of Little Dorrit and Bleak House.  I would categorize it as a transitional novel.

Other than the very slow start to this book (it took nearly 200 pages for something interesting to happen) my biggest quibble with this book is the title.  It's named after Martin Chuzzlewit, but honestly, Martin's part isn't even that big, especially when you compare it to the other Dickens works with eponymous titles.  Oliver Twist and David Copperfield?  Makes perfect sense -- these are the main characters and all the action revolves around them.  Little Dorrit?  Well, she's a little more peripheral to the story, but I guess I can agree with that one.  I haven't read Barnaby Rudge or The Mystery of Edwin Drood yet, so I can't comment on those.  But Martin Chuzzlewit is a terrible name for a book.   I suppose one could make the case that it's really about Martin the elder, whose appearance sets all the book's action in motion, since he arrives and gets all the relatives jockeying for position to see if they're going to get a get a piece of his estate in the event of his death.  Really, he's hardly in the book at all.

And Martin the younger leaves for America, but he doesn't really get that much time in the book either.  There's a lot more time spent on his faithful friend Tom Pinch, his nasty cousin Jonas Chuzzlewit, and the Pecksniff family, and what happens to them back in England during Martin's absence.  It's a good book and the plot and characters turned out to be interesting, but I personally think he could have come up with a better title.

When I begin to think about it, Dickens' other titles aren't all that interesting either.  Great Expectations?  A Tale of Two Cities?  Bleak House is my favorite, and Dombey and Son has great irony, but overall I think Trollope did a better job naming his books.  You can't beat Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right, or my personal favorite, Is He Popenjoy?  (What the heck does that mean?)  I still haven't read any of these titles, but they intrigue me. Yet they sit waiting patiently on the to-read shelf while I'm still trying to finish the major works of Charles Dickens.

This book also counts towards three of my challenges:  The Victorian Challenge; The Classics Challenge; and the Chunkster Challenge.

The Classics Challenge: February Prompt

Mr. Pecksniff and Old Martin Chuzzlewit

This month's Classics Challenge Prompt is to write about characters.  I'm currently attempting to read Martin Chuzzlewit, one of Charles Dickens' lesser known novels.  It wasn't my first choice for Dickens but one of my online groups is reading it and it was on the TBR shelf, so I decided to give it a shot.

I've read about 150 pages so far and unfortunately not much is happening -- I don't even know enough about any particular character to really write about, so I'll give a bit about each one, as well as I can remember.   Dickens tends to throw a lot of different characters and situations at the reader in the first parts of his books; eventually, everything will tie up together somehow and all will be revealed.  Well, sort of.

Right now there are a lot of unpleasant characters, and a lot of them are named Chuzzlewit.  There are in fact two Martin Chuzzlewits in the story, Martin the elder and Martin the younger.  Martin the elder is a cantankerous old man with a lot of money, and an incomplete will.  He's traveling with a young woman Mary who is some kind of ward, when he appears to fall ill.  Suddenly the relatives appear out of the woodwork, to kiss up and try and ingratiate themselves.  They all show up at the inn where Martin is staying and start arguing amongst themselves.  It's kind of like a contest to see which one is the most revolting and annoying.

Meanwhile, another Chuzzlewit shows up in the vicinity, unbeknownst to the other relatives.  He's Martin the younger, a grandson who has fallen out of favor with Martin the elder.   By a complete and utter coincidence -- lots of these in Dickens novels -- young Martin has just arrived in the village to study architecture with his cousin, Mr. Pecksniff.  Like his name implies, Pecksniff is an annoying character, very full of himself, scheming, and hypocritical.  He has two unmarried daughters and is hoping to marry one of them off to Martin.  It also appears that he's going to get Martin to do all his work, then take all the credit.  I anticipate lots of horrible behavior from him based on his name alone -- Dickens is brilliant at giving vile characters such appropriate names!

The character I like best so far is Tom Pinch, who works for the Pecksniffs.  I'm not exactly sure what he does.  He seems to be an all-around helper, definitely some sort of servant, and the Pecksniffs are very condescending to him.  However, he's kind to young Martin and seems generally good-hearted.  Because he's nice, I predict that something terrible will happen to him before the book is out.

This post probably doesn't exactly fit the parameters of this month's prompt -- it's taken Dickens so long to introduce all these characters and set the scene, and as much as I love him, he is so very awfully wordy.  His descriptions are great and sometimes very funny, but doggone it, I really wish something would happen already!

Bloggers, have any of you read Martin Chuzzlewit?  Does it get better?  It's not terrible so far but I'm just not excited about it yet.