Few authors so markedly ambivalent as Thomas Hardy. Because poets sweat ink when they make their forays into the novel while most novelists hardly dare to step on a line due to manifest lyrical incapacity.
So this English writer developed an unusual gift and managed, today with even more recognition if possible, a brilliant multifocal, even dichotomous work. Because if one stops to see the unexpected counterpoint of his light verses and his strong prose, the latter loaded with traditional romanticism on the surface, but existentialism deep down, we end up understanding the difficult task of writing as Hardy did. .
With that curious vision and expression of his work, Hardy shows us, from brilliant settings outlined in detail, to depths of the soul that his characters show, even with the weight of their gestures, movements and words. An essential author who always maintains a freshness rarely equaled.
Top 3 Recommended Thomas Hardy Novels
Far from the madding crowd
Only a pure romantic, of those of nineteenth-century birth, can address matters of love without the result being an inconsequential plot. Because love with its limitations, frustrations, its adversities from the circumstantial to the most deeply spiritual and its passions unleashed like lightning, all of this is the fruit of a vanished time. And now is not the time to make a love already naturalized in any of its vertices compatible with an epic narrative. So let's enjoy when loving had its most diverse vicissitudes...
Bathsheba Everdene, a girl with a smile "the kind that suggests that hearts are things that are lost and won," inherits, upon the death of her uncle, the largest farm in the town of Weatherbury. Three men surround this young owner, "strong and independent", who is undoubtedly in a position to choose: the pastor Gabriel Oak, her employee after an unfortunate attempt to become independent, and who suffers with silent aplomb his difference in position; the squire Boldwood, a rich and mature bachelor, somewhat dark and indelicate, but capable of loving with an unpredictable intensity; and Sergeant Francis Troy, handsome, accustomed to the favors of the world, conqueror.
Bathsheba can choose, then, and does choose ... although in a short time she will discover that she has given up "the simplicity of her single life to become the humble half of an indifferent all married couple." Far From the Madding Crowd is not just a formidable portrait of a Victorian heroine who knows that "it is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language created primarily by man to express her own." It is also a pastoral fresco with Shakespearean resonances, where landscape and history, nature and culture, maintain a tense and complex dialogue, full of small subtleties and ironies. Thomas Hardy achieved his first great success with this novel, and also perhaps the kindest of his masterpieces.
The Forest Dwellers
Grace Melbury, the beautiful and delicate daughter of a prosperous logger who would do anything for her, returns to the small town of her childhood after receiving a refined education far from there. Her reunion with the one who was always destined to be her husband, Giles Winterborne, reveals to the two that, despite all that he may love her, he does not live up to their new social expectations and, instead, he does. new doctor of the region, the aristocratic Edred Fitzpiers, who appears surrounded by books and a rare aura of mystery.
The relationship that is established between the three will be peppered with misunderstandings and betrayals, but also with a devotion and loyalty that will lead to an extraordinary outcome. "The Forest Inhabitants", hitherto unpublished in Spanish, is one of the most brilliant, controversial and representative novels of the narrative of Thomas Hardy, who always considered it his favorite work. Its evocative landscapes and its characters full of force make The Inhabitants of the Forest an indispensable work.
Jude the dark
Perhaps Dorian Gray inspired this work. Who knows? It is only 5 years between the birth of the overwhelming proposal of Oscar Wilde and of this other story more attached to the earth in the existential but also deeply lyrical in the reading of the time that escapes, of the destinies and the twists and turns that lead us to perditions and temptations that are too apparent.
The darkening of the soul sometimes seems something of age. But there are those who plunge into those dark waters with a tragic waste of incalculable value while others only fall by weight to the abyssal depths. Dorian Gray and Jude should have met, shared their doom in an anthological theatrical conversation ...
Jude Fawley is a young man of peasant origin whose main aspiration is to have an education, for which he does not skimp on efforts even when he is employed as a stonemason. The achievement of his illusions, however, will be affected by his relationships, first, with the easygoing Arabella Donn and, later, with his lively and intelligent cousin Sue. Jude's impulses and decisions will increasingly and tragically complicate his life trajectory until a disastrous end that will mark, precisely, the darkness of his existence.
