The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford · first published 1915
25% recommend75% neutral
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy - or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.
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…then try Pynchon or Gaddis. The 19th century Russians from Gogol to Chekhov are pretty much can't-lose. Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is beautiful and captures the spirit of youth. Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a short masterpiece. The Great Gatsby is as good as its reputation says. Read Dickens if you want the essence of the English language and the English character. Read Kafka for the strangest articulation…
on “Ask HN: What are some good books?” ↗Ford Maddox Ford's novel The Good Soldier once a twice mentions as a blacksmith's saying "By hammer and hand all art doth stand" which is in the same spirit, and suggests to me that variants have been around for a long time.
on ““If Your Only Tool Is a Hammer Then Every Problem Looks Like a Nail”” ↗I was thinking Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. Having an unreliable narrator running the adventure story would play right into the inability of the LLM to effectively hold state.
on “Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game” ↗…claimed that Heller had told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished World War I satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. "
on “The Good Soldier Švejk (2018)” ↗