Anyway, I was saying I don't know what style the posts about The Eyre Affair will take, but so far rambling seems like the theme. This is how I generally talk about things so I'm OK with this form. For now anyway. I change my mind a lot.
Onto the book! I've read the whole Thursday Next series a bunch of times (I repeat myself a lot too) but I'm going to try to keep my posts just about the part of the book I'm up to. As I said I change my mind a lot (and that repetition thing) so this might change. I'll at least try not to reference further in the book or the other books of the series. But this is a long way of saying I love the character Thursday Next but I can only say this having read the series so far, not that the The Eyre Affair so far has lead me to this statement. She is a strong, witty and independent female character without being masculinized or weird touchy feel-y I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar type character. These characters are few and far between, especially in contemporary humorous books and even when such a character does exist she isn't the main character. She's a supporting character and one that doesn't have to be fleshed out like a main character.OK, maybe this paragraph will actually mention something about the story. We'll see. Brave New World talked about how art is abandoned for stability. The world created in The Eyre Affair goes in an entirely different way. Thursday Next is an operative with the Literary Detectives, a whole department charged with dealing with crimes and law over literature. Stability can suck it; I would way rather live in this world. Thursday is listening to a news report and there is a story about a young surrealist that was stabbed to death by a "gang adhering to a radical school of French impressionists" (Fforde 10). Obviously I don't actually want people to be stabbed for their artistic beliefs but I like the idea of someone getting so worked up over art. It's like the news reports of people rioting when they heard The Rite of Spring for the first time. Rioting! Over classical music! I've been trying to think of something that could cause me to riot but I'm coming up blank. Probably because whenever I try to come up with a specific example of anything I blank.
I'm going to end this now with this quote, when Thursday is visited by a Baconian: "If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, I must be dafter than I look." (38)
Fforde, Jasper. The Eyre Affair. Penguin Group, New York. 2001
