The Golden Bowl
by Henry James · first published 1904
33% recommend33% neutral33% critical
A rich American art-collector & his daughter Maggie buy in for themselves & to their greater glory a beautiful young wife & a noble husband. They do not know that Charlotte & Prince Amerigo were formerly lovers, nor that on the eve of the Prince's marriage they had discovered, in an antique shop, a golden bowl with a secret flaw.
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…inland across the golf-links. Either path offers tempting digressions towards it. He comes to know it from a hundred aspects and under a thousand conditions of light and atmosphere…. Henry James's _The Golden Bowl_ and a few other of his late novels are kind of a miracle of art, as in it's miraculous that they exist and nothing else really resembles them outside of maybe Proust!
on “Henry James and H.G. Wells (1958)” ↗Naughty you. I confess that a) I have never been able to fight my way through The Golden Bowl or The Wings of the Dove, and that b) I can't imagine that life, let only leisure, is long enough for 140 volumes of Henry James's letter. Also, I wonder who in the world one would impress by reading…
on “A sufferable snob – The Complete Letters of Henry James” ↗…strikes me as somewhat orthogonal to what Scott was writing of. I must say that while I find middle and early James very readable, I have tried and failed more than once to read any distance into The Golden Bowl or The Wings of the Dove.
on “Henry James and the Great Y.A. Debate” ↗…increasing order of difficulty: 0) The autumn of the patriarch, by Marquez 1) Gormenghast series, by Mervyn Peake 2) The third period of Henry James (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl). 3) The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch I do suggest trying Gormenghast, it's an amazingly written fantasy series.
on “Seven great but notoriously hard-to-finish books” ↗…Corrections, but it struck me as straightforward reading. Moby Dick, The Man Without Qualities, and Don Quixote are long, but to my notion very readable in a way that Remembrance of Things Past or The Golden Bowl are not.
on “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books (2002)” ↗