Age Of Innocence

Lo compré porque es un clásico americano pero no logré engancharme, lo terminé lo más rápido que pude puesto que en ningún momento me atrapó. Hay algo de escandaloso en la trama para la época pero me resultó algo tedioso y lento.

The reading of Edith Wharton's 'The Age of Innocence' was long overdue for me. I admit I found the beginning a little tedious with the never-ending list of characters, the detailed description of New York City's elite society at the end of the century with all its traditions, rituals and judgemental morality. The story follows Newland Archer's, the POV character, struggle to live up to the expectations set up by his bourgeois family and marry the sweet, conventional, May Welland, while secretly longing to run off with Countess Ellen Olenska, a married woman who defies the status quo. Family and social expectations conflict with Newland's and Ellen's wish for a more passionate life away from the rigidity of high society. Newland must choose, his wife or his lover. His choice will determine the path his life will take. We meet up with him years later, widowed and father of three children. The memories of his emotional struggles are still with him. Is there regret, or the urge to start over where he left off? The ending is both thought-provoking and poignant. This wonderful story, written over 100 years ago, is still prevalent today. Life's demands have a tendency to erode the passions and struggles, which in our youth we were ready to die for. All that is left is the memory of a beating heart.

J'ai découvert la plume d'Edith Wharton avec ce roman.Une jolie lecture, la romance qui se tisse entre les deux personnages est intéressante et on a toujours envie d'en lire plus. Cependant, le rythme se tarit parfois et le récit souffre de quelques longueurs.Malgré tout, j'ai rapidement été emportée par l'histoire et par cette société New Yorkaise tentant tant bien que mal de se cacher derrière des convenances viellissantes.

Todo muy correcto y muy rápido. Tal y como pone en el anuncio. Volvería a comprar este artículo otra vez

In the first place style and subject matter have greatly entertained me. I like books about real historical periods, which is the case here. The novel depicts the super-rich moneyed aristocracy of the Gilded Age in New York in the last decades of the 19th century. It deals with the rifts and fissures in that class and applies them to its individual pro- and antagonists with their specific psychological reactions, also to the patriarchal domination of women. Male domination also affects the wives' self-awareness, especially their feeling of happiness in that they have subconsciously internalised this domination. So the young married husband Newland Archer ruminates about his wife May:'There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.' (Collector's Library, 2004, p. 198)This is in stark contrast to the Countess Ellen Olenska who has come from Europe after a failed marriage and therefore meets with little acceptance, partly being shunned in society, but who appears as an independent woman standing her ground. But eventually she feels she has to return to Europe. It is this woman that Newland Archer, although married, falls in love with, attracted by her self-assertion. So he begins doubting his own standards in which he and May have been brought up. I felt rather touched when I read that 30 years later, after the premature death of his wife, Newland Archer stands with his son before the house in Paris where Olenska had moved and cannot find the strength and courage to pay her the visit he has come for and have a reunion with her. He has lived for so long in the conservative New York society cherishing his own image of her that he cannot face her eventually. Only his son finally goes up the stairs to the arranged meeting. - Thus the rifts and cracks in the moral and ideological standards of the rich class are incorporated in the plot and figures of the novel, an accomplishment that I greatly appreciate and enjoy in literature. The book reaches beyond the time it describes and beyond the time when it was published (1920), for societies should always be subject to scrutiny.In the decades before and after 1900, such novels were en vogue in Europe such as by Thomas Mann, John Galsworthy or at the end of the 19th century Theodor Fontane. Those who enjoy finely composed and splendidly phrased literature should read this novel.