The Good Soldier by Ford Madox FordMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When it was time to write my senior thesis in college, I picked Ford's novel, because it was the only one I felt passionate about: I HATED IT!
Anyhow -- Now in my 50s, I've reached the "age of reflection." As such, I thought, why not go back and revisit the novel?
Perhaps it's not surprising, given how much water is under my bridge and how many novels I've attempted to write, my estimation of The Good Soldier has done a 180. Much of what I now find fascinating about the book is what drove me nuts in my teens. Ford refuses to follow a clear timeline, the 1st person's POV forever shifting and changing, reflections of the same event at different times with sometimes conflicting "facts", I now find captures the shifting and not always trustworthy ways memory works.
In college, it was a trend to study books "in and of themselves", which I now believe is utter hoo-ha, since it seems impossible to divorce historical context from what's and how it's written. In my reading up on Ford, I now have learned that he was Modernist friend of the Cubists and The Good Soldier can be understood as a cubist novel.
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