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    Jude the Obscure
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    Jude the Obscure
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    Jude the Obscure
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    Jude the Obscure

    Written by Thomas Hardy

    Narrated by Samuel West

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Penguin Classics presents Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by Samuel West.

    'As you got older, ... you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and scorched it.

    If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man'

    Jude Fawley, the stonemason excluded not by his wits but by poverty from the world of Christminster privilege, finds fulfilment in his relationship with Sue Bridehead. Both have left earlier marriages. Ironically, when tragedy tests their union it is Sue, the modern emancipated woman, who proves unequal to the challenge. Hardy's fearless exploration of sexual and social relationships and his prophetic critique of marriage scandalised the late Victorian establishment and marked the end of his career as a novelist.

    Part of a series of vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives. Affordable, collectable, quality productions - perfect for on-the-go listening.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin UK Audio
    Release dateSep 27, 2012
    ISBN9780718198572
    Author

    Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for his novels, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), which was denounced as morally objectionable. Hardy, disgusted with this reaction, declared he would never write fiction again and devoted the rest of his literary career to poetry.

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    Reviews for Jude the Obscure

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    • 4/5
      I read this book during my senior year in college, so it's been a "few" years! I do remember being hooked on Thomas Hardy, and not because it was required reading!
    • 4/5
      This is one of those books that takes you straight into another time and place. Hardy is such a vivid writer, you can feel and touch and smell and see across the places he describes.

      It is crushingly sad, but the truth of the situation is psychologically real and mature, born out of extreme frustration and despair at the social reality of the time, the limitations of class and poverty. He was angry, and his passion saturates the book. The dysfunctionality of the characters is all too familiar and believable, the self-deception, the misplaced loyalties, the character flaws they can't get past, the real experience of poverty and failure. How many people have you known who didn't or couldn't live up to their youthful dreams, never made use of their most obvious talents because of a lack of education, money, connections, resourcefulness, early parenthood?
    • 5/5
      I read this out of curiosity during my freshman year in college. When I approached my English 1A professor about doing a paper on it, she -- and I'm not joking here -- said, "Why would you want to write about a dead white male?" Taken aback, I dutifully bowed my pimpled head and submitted a paper on Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men.

      Not to take anything away from Gaines, who I ended up admiring in his way, but Ms. F? You can suck it.
    • 2/5
      I finished this book on 13 Dec 1964 and after being so impressed by Tess, this book really turned me off. It is a dreary book and very disconcerting.
    • 4/5
      Of all the classic European authors, Thomas Hardy is my favorite. I just love his themes of despair and bitter social commentary. "Jude the Obscure" was the last book that he ever wrote, and it was received with such controversy and scandal that he decided to write only poetry afterward.It is the story of Jude Fawley, a studious and intelligent young man who aspires to become a scholar, a writer, and a professor. Instead of running and playing with his peers, he spends his time reading, and he teaches himself Greek and Latin. (How could I not love him?) However, his organized plans are interrupted when his sweetheart, Arabella, announces that she is pregnant. Compelled to do the honorable thing, Jude marries her at once. But upon finding that Arabella has tricked him into wedlock, the two fall into disagreement and part ways. After this, Jude becomes aware of the existence of a cousin of his named Sue, and after seeking her out, falls deeply in love with her. But before he has a chance to reveal his feelings, she agrees to marry another man. She and Jude begin a long affair together, always mindful of the words that Jude's aunt so sternly warned him, that their families were not made for marriage, and their unions were fated to meet an unlucky end."Jude" is typical Hardy, and his writing is at its best here. It is the culmination of his success and progress as a writer, and if you have read other books of his, it makes it even easier to see how strong this last one is. His invented English region of Wessex is a very real place that Hardy brings to life seemingly effortlessly. By now, I would imagine that he knows his Wessex inside and out, and no longer has to think up new details about it, as he already knows them all. It seemed very natural, and I loved the focus on Christminster (based on Oxford) as a sort of dreamy paragon of aspiration to Jude, one that is always in reach but never attainable. Jude travels around the Wessex area quite a lot in the book, so we get to see quite a few different towns and cities. It made looking at the familiar map of Wessex on the first pages even more interesting.I loved our hero, Jude. From the beginning, he shows himself to be a thoughtful, bright, and good-hearted young boy. He is, perhaps, a bit too good, and ultimately it ruins him. A foreshadowing of this is in the first couple pages of the book, when as a child he is hired to scare birds off the grain fields by throwing stones at them. But Jude is so tender that he cannot bear to see a rock hit one of the birds, and imagines them hungry, so he lets them eat the grain. He is promptly fired, and his crusty aunt scolds him exasperatedly "If ye can't skeer birds, what can ye do?"His strong sense of honor and morality (perhaps developed due to reading so many books about dashing heroes?) also begin and set in motion the long series of events concerning women, love, and marriage that are to take up most of his disappointing life.He forces himself to marry Arabella after she tells him she is pregnant, even though he acknowledges that it ruins all his dreams, and he knows she is "not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind."Later, his attention and concern for womanly sensitivity prevent him from telling Sue of his feelings for her, and once she announces that she is engaged, Jude politely congratulates her rather than speaking his mind.I liked Jude very much, and I loved his scholarly attitude toward things. I kept hoping that things would work out for him in the end - that he would have a true, happy marriage and fulfill his dream of being a learned professor. But the further the book goes, the more sharply we see how unlikely this is.Sue Bridehead, the most prominent and memorable of the female characters, was the only woman that Jude ever truly loved. From the first time he sees her, he is fascinated by her. Unlike many women of her time, Sue is worldly and well read, and she makes a living off teaching jobs. She and Jude have many discussions about scientific and philosophic matters. However, Sue was also quite immature and often quite silly. She occasionally does tiny things that may or may not mildly annoy Jude, and then bursts out in dramatic guilt, begging Jude to forgive her and saying that he must hate her now. She does this often, and it started to really irritate me, though Jude seemed to view it as almost charming. Sue was unpredictable and prone to sudden mood changes, and I didn't actually like her.Men want Sue, but cannot have her, and that is exactly how she wants it. She often mentions a young man who was her dearest friend at college, who was desperately in love with her. Sue did not return his feelings, but that didn't stop her from moving in with him (in an entirely separate bedroom, of course, she makes sure we know). The poor man, always having Sue so close, sleeping a few steps away from him, but never able to have her.When Sue first develops her friendship with Jude, she does not realize at first how much he cares for her. She flirts a bit, she likes the attention he pays her. But once she learns of his feelings, she taunts him even more drastically - but whether purposefully or without thought, I couldn't decide. She tells him one moment that she is going to be married to Phillotson forever, and in the next moment she is kissing Jude. Next, she asks Jude to come to her wedding. Though he knows how painful it will be, Jude, being honorable to a fault, agrees. And if this isn't far enough, Sue requests that Jude be the one to give her away as a bride.Upon living with Phillotson, Sue does much the same thing, letting her husband have her legally but making it clear that she does not love him. She even begins sleeping in a broom closet with spiders in it, rather than sleep in his bed.Sue is in love with attention, and underneath she is something of a cold-hearted woman. She wants to be desired but not had, loved but not in love herself.Even though I never warmed up to her, I was sympathetic with her. She is an interesting character, and I think that part of why Jude was so fascinated by her is that he can never quite figure her out, or predict what she will do next.Of course, marriage is a revolving theme here. In general, the public was shocked by the way it was treated by Hardy in these pages. We see a lot of married couples leaving each other - Arabella leaves Jude, Arabella refers to leaving her 2nd husband in Australia, Sue leaves Phillotsen... Interesting as well that it seems to always be the women who are leaving the poor men behind, even rarer in 1896 Europe.Sue and Jude almost marry many times, but for some reason, they are never quite able to bring themselves to do it. Why must they obey society's rules? they say. They tell themselves that their love for each other makes them as married as the next couple.In the end, Sue abandons this view she has pressed so insistently on Jude and becomes over-zealous about the restrictive bonds of marriage. I just loved reading this book, in which Hardy is at his most mature and detailed. His characters are so real and memorable, that I think I would remember them forever without ever having to pick up his book again. It has been over a month since I finished "Jude the Obscure," but it is still so fresh in my mind. It is a very impressive story.It's Thomas Hardy, so of course - highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Like most books written in the period, Jude the Obscure does have several passages that can be difficult to wade through. However, unlike many such classics, Jude is worth the effort. This book is a bitter-sweet love story set in a time filled with conventions and behavioural expectations that could make life very difficult for those who did not conform. I highly recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      As a young boy, Jude Fawley reads everything he can get his hands on and dreams of going to college. He’s an orphan living in the English countryside yearning to move to Christminster (based on Oxford). When he finally gets the opportunity to begin to make his way in the world he meets a saucy milkmaid, Arabella, and is lured away from his goals. Jude’s true love is his cousin Sue Bridehead, who shares his passion for intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately their timing always seems off. When he’s tied to Arabella, Sue is free and when he’s free, Sue is tied to a school teacher named Phillotson. Jude is such a tragic character. His every effort to attain a happy life seems to be thwarted by things that are out of his control. The tragedy seems unavoidable even when you’re hoping the characters make different decisions. Without Hardy’s beautiful writing this book would be unreadable because it’s so depressing, but he makes it enthralling. In some ways it reminded me of a more likeable version of Wuthering Heights. The same premise of two souls made of the same stuff, but both ill-matched in marriages and kept apart. Only in Jude there’s no crazy, selfish character and in Wuthering Heights there’s less religion. One of the novel’s main themes is marriage. The characters are constantly at odds with the union, which surprised me because it was published in 1895. I’m sure the book caused quite a stir when it first came out. This was my first foray into Thomas Hardy and from what I’ve heard his other books have similar themes. This one was hard to rate, because though I loved the writing, the story leaves you aching for Jude and wishing you could have made his life better. So it’s not a book I feel like I loved. I will definitely read more of his work, (I’ve got Tess of the D’Ubervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd on my TBR list), but I may have to wait a bit before diving into another heartbreaker.  
    • 3/5
      Sort of disappointing, depressing, and pointless, but I could see that it was written well at any rate.
    • 4/5
      Duty or freedom? Marriage or passion? Faith or despair? A book full of contrasts, it marked a deep change at the time.
    • 4/5
      Typical Hardy - full of sex (minus the descriptions of course) and some desperate sadness. I like the way he doesn't find it necessary to have everyone living happily ever after by the end of the book.
    • 4/5
      I thought I loved Thomas Hardy. He has a way with words that places the reader at the scene and brings those scenes to life for any modern reader. However, after careful reflection, I am not too certain I stand by my conviction that I like Thomas Hardy. See, he's too depressing. Most of his characters are put into unfortunate situations, find their way out for a bit and then end up worse than when the reader is first introduced to them. This holds true with Tess of the D'Urbervilles and holds true with Jude the Obscure as well.With Jude, Hardy presents the dreamer beset by reality. This is a clear sign that not all will bode well for dear Jude. As this is a general theme in Hardy's works, one has to wonder that Hardy just did not like those who dreamt of a better life and sought ways to improve themselves. It is such a negative attitude as well as the exact opposite of the American dream.One cannot mention Jude the Obscure without mentioning marriage, as this is where the novel gets all of its tension, which drives the plot forward. As it is believed that Jude the Obscure is relatively autobiographical, make no mistake that Hardy does not have a very positive view of the status of marriage. His is rather a very modern point of view in a Victorian era that is not ready for such ideas. The idea of marriage is a continual issue for Sue, which is where the reader can see the biggest conflict. In Sue, Hardy presents the dichotomy between individual values (no marriage) and society's values (marriage required). According to Hardy, one cannot coexist with the other, and a person must choose between either set of values. However, to choose against society requires a thick skin and a level of patience and/or ignorance of society's scorn - neither of which could be used to describe Sue. As for the institution itself, Hardy still is rather pessimistic. At one point in time, the narrator mentions that a truly married couple did not act affectionate but rather should yell and argue and throw furniture at each other. Both Sue and Jude marry people that repulse them, yet their love for each other is not allowed to flourish because it is not contained within the institution of marriage. The message the reader cannot help but take away from these occurrences is that love has no place in marriage. Interesting, no?Hardy's discussion of children is just as depressing. There is much talk about whether children would be better off never having been born if they are to be born into a poor family. "'I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!'" (pg. 355) This begs the question whether Hardy is trying to tell us that Jude was essentially doomed to a life of suffering from the moment he was born. Either way, it is a powerful statement, about an issue that has been an ongoing, and passionate debate for years. All of these issues leads to a very dark, morose novel. I struggled to get behind the characters, as Sue drove me insane with her waffling and inability to make a decision and stick with it, and Jude was not forceful enough. I kept waiting for the moment for Jude to stand up for his beliefs and his happiness. Rather, he sits back and accepts everything that happens to him, without making an effort to change it for his own benefit. It wasn't that Jude lacked backbone; he just lacked a desire to stand and fight. I remained disappointed with Jude and distracted by Sue throughout the novel, even while I kept hoping that either character would change. Neither one did.Overall, I cannot say that I truly enjoyed Jude the Obscure, but I did glean a bit more about life in Victorian England for the desolate and downtrodden. Having to leave one town for another when the work ran out, having to past muster with a potential landlord just to rent a room, living in such small towns that were geographically close together so that gossip easily spread from one village to another - it was a rough life, one that requires spirit, drive, and an unwillingness to succumb to the pressures of life. Unfortunately, neither Sue nor Jude had any one of those characteristics, and therein lies my issue. I would have appreciated more character growth from both main characters. I feel like I should not have supported the two minor characters more than I did the two main ones, but as they showed the most gumption, they earned my admiration. Hardy is a must-read for any classic lover only because he portrays various milieu of English life with precision. It isn't the happiest of pictures most times, but as a learning experience for an understanding of English life outside what is taught in history books, he is one of the best.
    • 5/5
      This is the kind of book that spans the critical reader's spectrum: from a total and complete loathing of the novel to recognizing it as a masterful writing work of a literary genius. Yes, it's terribly depressing, and it doesn't pull any punches with reality itself. It's not a Victorian gala affair, nor is it a Dickensian ending. Hardy possesses a great voice for narration, and an even better voice for description and characterization:A powerful novel that still resonates 12 years later after I read it. I still haven't got the initiative to read it again. I still remember the ending. WOW!
    • 1/5
      Wow, Thomas Hardy, I thought you were alright after Tess of the d'Ubervilles. A little depressing, perhaps, but not too badly written. However, Jude the Obscure is just...can I get my six hours back, please? Sue and Arabella are quite possibly the two worst females in the whole field of literature. They are pushy, flighty, and utterly selfish. Instead of pitying Jude, however, I just want to kick his butt for always being pushed around by them.My problem in this wasn't with the writing or the depressing attitude, but in the characters themselves. I simply cannot stand reading about purely selfish people who think they're blameless and actually the victim, much like I can't stand interacting with these people in real life.
    • 4/5
      Jude Fawley, the central character of the novel, has hopes for a future wherein he can get an education, and rise out of poverty. In this pursuit, he meets a young woman named Arabella, who convinces him to marry her after tricking him into believing she might be pregnant. Although the couple do eventually have a child together, Arabella abandons Jude before revealing her pregnancy. Jude delves back into work by becoming a stone-mason, wherein he meets young Sue Bridehead and falls madly in love with her. A strange relationship develops between the two, however, as Sue like Jude, but seemingly fights and withholds her feelings from him, eventually marrying the schoolmaster she works for out of some sense of obligation. Strangely, Sue instantly regrets her decision and leaves her husband before the marriage is consummated, and moves in with Jude.The rest I hate to reveal, as much more drama occurs, including the return of Arabella with a son that Jude never knew he had, and Arabella's marriage to another man, which was considered illegal because of her prior marriage to Jude. Sue and Jude seem well matched though, and are on the path to weather out the storms of life that confront them, but like all Hardy novels, tragedy is just around the corner.After having a friend of mine read this novel and vehemently declare how much she hated it, I had a good deal of curiosity about the story. I will say though, that my own feelings are quite different. While I understand the frustration that comes from reading a novel with twists and tragedies as Hardy's novels do, I also really found the subject intriguing. Not only did I find Sue's evasive toying with Jude nearly unbearable to take, but also failed to comprehend why such a nice man as Jude would put up with the manipulation and whining that seemed to come from any and all of the women in his life. I tried to take into account the time period, realizing that Jude's life would be nothing but one big scandal, which actually made me like Jude more. As a character, I found him to be filled with honor, and merely a man dealing with the cards life had dealt him. As for Sue, Arabella, Phillotson (Sue's first husband), and a parade of other characters, I would say that the broad spectrum of human characters and their traits didn't fare well in this novel.
    • 5/5
      A masterpiece of Victorian tragedy, Jude is tortured, miserable and doomed, but this beautiful novel is profoundly moving. The language is utterly gorgeous and Thomas Hardy is a peerless genius. Truly, absolutely, the best book I have ever read. You will cry.
    • 4/5
      Jude Fawley is a kind, gentle and at times gullible young man. His is the story of a man's struggle to realize his dream by furthering his education to become a minister. "He considered that he might so mark out his coming years as to begin his ministry at the age of thirty - an age which much attracted him as being that of his exemplar when he first began to teach in Galilee." But Jude is torn between two women, the one he loves and the one to which he is married. Both are responsible for his complete downfall. He desires to do what is right in the eyes of the church and society but that is in direct contrast to the beliefs of his lover, Sue Bridehead, a woman 50 years ahead of her time. Through tragedy, Sue turns to the church while Jude turns away. Jude's desire to do right is now Sue's to the extent that she's become fanatical. Sue believes that in order to save her soul she must leave the man she loves.Hardy's last novel is long, tedious and wordy yet the love quadrangle needs to be rectified so one plods on. I have found Hardy to be a very forward thinking man who's many thoughts in this book have come to fruition. He delves into subject matter that was, no doubt, shocking for his time. I am certainly happy to have read Jude the Obscure and thought it a fascinating study of humanity in the late 19th century but it's certainly not for everyone. If you have enjoyed Hardy in the past and know what to expect from him I would recommend this one.
    • 2/5
      Tess has to be one of my favorite novels of all time. I devoured it. Devoured Far From the Madding Crowd after that and you can just imagine how much I was looking forward to Jude."The masterpiece," I was told. "Classic!" "Like Tess, only better!"Imagine my horror when going through my LibraryThing account looking for books to tag, star, and review, when I can across Jude and realized I had forgotten I was reading it.Sure, sometimes I'll be reading one book, and one that has more claims on my time will come along (obligated to read and review, has holds on it at the library), but I don't think I've ever put a book down before, and simply forgotten about it.And that pretty much sums up the problems I had with Jude. Maybe the ending is magnificent, but the middle is so dreadfully dull that it is awfully hard to get to. I don't mean it is bad, I just mean it is, well, forgettable. If you want to read a good Hardy novel of self-destruction, I'm afraid I'm still going to have to recommend Tess.
    • 4/5
      Jude the Obscure is Hardy's masterpiece. As in, the work an apprentice submits to prove that he is now good enough become a master. There is no other way to read this polemic against church, marriage and higher education. It is coming-out-of-the-closet, showing-his-colours, rest-on-his-laurels masterpiece. And though it was recieved with more brickbats than laurels, he did rest on it, and never wrote any other novel after this. Once you read this book, you realize why. There was nothing more to say. He has said it all.And said it well. Not even once does this book drag, there are no paragraphs spanning pages and pages. In a book which is meant to decry everything that was wrong- and indeed is still wrong- with society, there are no 4 page speeches to skip. Hardy's characters show, and do not tell. His working class, self taught hero never gets into Oxford, and his 'luminously' intelligent lover doesn't even think of it- you don't need speeches about stultified education after that. And Hardy manages to depict bad marriages between essentially good people, without demonizing anyone, and even Arabella is treated with more kindness that she can expect from a novel like this- which is about all that is fine in humanity, storybook fine, that is. Not practical, cheerful, cut-your-lossses-and-move-on there-is-a-life-to-be-lived fine, the way Arabella is.Sue Bridehead on the other hand, is certainly not practical, whatever else she might be. In fact, she is more than a character, she is a compilation of the reasons this novel exists. She is the mouthpiece for Hardy's views on all that is holy, she is the mirror he holds up to reflect society's hypocrisy, she is every bit a dream lover, and her impracticality is the only justification we get for the rather flimsy plot.This pretty lady almost certainly drives three men to early graves, but even then, I suppose that if you had to look for a lover in Victorian literature, she would be a much better option than, say, Elizabeth Bennett. One, ten minutes with her will perhaps be more interesting than any amount of time with Miss Elizabeth, who is actually not all that uninteresting herself, and two, she lives in a world where sex exists. I read somewhere that Sue is among literature's first feminists, and indeed, she is one of the greatest heroines of literature. She has the burden of carrying the novel on her slim shoulders, and she manages it with grace, though it proves too much for her in the end.
    • 5/5
      One of the most powerful books I've ever read. I found the impact shattering. The tragedies of men's and women's struggles against the social system are portrayed as hopeless and seemingly eternal.
    • 1/5
      Nice to see the young Kate Winslet and her fine style of acting
    • 4/5
      Midway through this, I called my boyfriend, who has an English lit degree, and asked, "Um, besides all the spouse-swapping, is anything actually going to happen in this book?" He laughed and said, "Trust me. Something's going to happen."Something did.I finished the book at 3:00 a.m. and couldn't sleep all night. I staggered down to breakfast and sat in the cafeteria with such a traumatized expression that several friends asked me what had happened. Thomas Hardy happened, that's what. Little Father Time happened.
    • 4/5
      Thomas Hardy doesn’t seem to be one of the more well-sung Victorian writers, particularly alongside the Brontë sisters and Dickens, but his text is just as full of semicolons and Victorian English slang as theirs are. This book in particular was the source of some trouble for him; his first wife, for example, thought that the book would be perceived as autobiographical and thus divorced him because she feared being considered his cousin—as Jude’s love was his cousin, Sue Bridehead—not to mention that it was wildly unpopular with critics of the time, who criticized it as being morally outrageous and instigated book burnings for it and the like.This is the sort of book that has to be read in fairly large chunks, because that’s about the only way that the story gets a reaction of anything more than, “Oh, well, nothing’s happening.” Due to that, I can’t fathom that this will be a popular novel with most modern readers, particularly those who might be attracted to it because of its perceived scandalous nature (or for the popularity of the Beatles song “Hey Jude”—they’re really very different).Coming from a less modern perspective, though, it’s extremely easy to see why this would have been extremely risqué subject material in 1895. For a population who covered their pianos with skirts so as not to show their inanimate legs, heavily implied premarital sex and living in sin with one’s cousin wouldn’t be acceptable at all, particularly when combined with various blasphemes of Jude’s.As a modern reader, I can’t say that I was too terribly interested in the book aside from the general idea of it. Had the book been published even about fifty years later, I could see where it would have been heavily edited to condense it from around four hundred pages in a trade paperback format to about half its size in something closer to a mass-market edition. Certain scenes would have to be emphasized to appeal to readers and others would have to be cut out completely. However, in spite of the slow-moving story, the writing is still interesting stylistically. When read, it seems vaguely more conversational than the usual Victorian novel, yet still fairly high-brow; as if someone were trying to describe a convoluted thesis paper in the simplest terms possible and not doing particularly well in that endeavor.This promises to hold interest for readers who can keep themselves in a Victorian mindset; for others, it wouldn’t be deemed particularly interesting or necessarily well worth reading. Still, the implications from the Victorian era are interesting enough for me to have read the whole thing through.
    • 5/5
      If you have ever felt that it is all for naught - then read Hardy; he's in your corner. Take that, all you Pollyanna's! Existentialists know in our darkest hearts that we could all be Jude, the Obscure. That in many ways we ARE Jude, the Obscure. The romance between Jude and Sue reminds me of fan fiction for Moulin Rouge played out to it's terrible, not so Spectacular Spectacular end... they turn to drink, they are mean, they are alone. Why was it not enough for them to love, and be loved in return? SPOILER*** after the tragedy that did befall their family, I'm not sure that I could have managed to go on at all. We read these novels and comfort ourselves that at least we're not yet on our deathbed, asking for water. EMO[IMO] young people should be encouraged to read all Hardy's work - in fact, publishing houses - might I suggest for a new paperback run a cover with black eyed, scary scrawny youths in drab garb clutching each other against a menacing cathedral. I would buy it - again.
    • 4/5
      Jude the obtuse. Jude the feckless. Jude the petty. Jude the wet. If ,Far from the Madding Crowd is essentially anachronistic, and Tess very much of its moment, this book is kind of about what happens when those worlds come screeching together - like, in idyllic no-madding Wessex Jude and Arabella would have stuck by one another and he would have found his dream, and in a putative Sue she would have been the heroine and been spit out with all her stupid Greeks, but this is neither fantasy or cautionary tale - Hardy seems to be trying to be real with us, but he doesn't know what real is and ends up with characters that oscillate between purple harlequin-romance prose and clumsy sensationalism (he actually seems to seriously for real be arguing that Jude was brought low by drink, and that it was up to the women to stop him). Everybody in this book is a pointless waste sleepwaling their way through life, though, and I guess it's real and contemporary in that sense. Everybody comes out bad, but the women have to take responsibility for the men as well as themselves, and that allows the men to come out somewhat better, and that troubles me. Ugh, Victoria England!
    • 5/5
      My favorite book in the whole world, with the most realistic moral to any book life is rubbish and then it's just going to get much moch worse!
    • 4/5
      Marriage and restrict of social mores. Excellent.
    • 3/5
      A sad tale lovingly rendered from boyhood to death. All the usual literary devices are there, but it is the moral questions: what is the true right and the true wrong, that stay with you. And it is the character's inability to find that true course and stay with it that is their undoing, by way of passion, greed, fear, or a certain class consciousness. Of course, no one is going to read this who isn't either already a Hardy fan or studying for a lit exam.
    • 4/5
      Encompasses Hardy's flaws and strengths. The narrator is phlegmatic and almost stilted, but somehow enjoyable to "listen" to. The plot has Hardy's hallmarks--the past coming back incessantly to haunt you, incredible coincidences, and forgotten individuals returning to the main character's life at key points.One key problem I had was that I don't think Jude's love for his cousin was ever properly explained. I could not figure out his infatuation with her.I don't know what it is about Hardy, because his plots are absurd, the writing does not seem particularly impressive, but somehow I find him fun and readable. This is the second one I've read by him, and would not hesitate to try another.
    • 5/5
      Hardy, why must you always do this. If you're looking for an optimistic book to keep you happy then you're in the wrong place. The characters in this are so painful, but they make you feel in a way that other writers can't accomplish. This is most definitely a book that stays with you afterward and forces you to wrestle with what is presented.
    • 4/5
      Oh my goodness! Could a book be any more depressing and lovely? In my opinion, this is one of his best. The plot is so real. He hides nothing and so, shows the grotesque along with the tender. You hope for Jude the entire book - that he will finally find happiness and realize his dreams. No matter what obstacles befall him throughout the story, you continue to hope from somewhere inside the human spirit. At the end, you are almost left breathless as you watch his love walk away and you know that a happy ending is not in order for him. I love that. Hardy doesn't lie to the reader. Sometimes, happy endings don't exist in reality. He explores this world of pain and sorrow wonderfully.