Possession
Ratings68
Average rating3.9
“I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”
Not sure what the actual plot was supposed to be about but the first quarter of the book was a quagmire of people I wasn't interested in, poetry, and diving into topics I wasn't interested in.
I'm not waiting around for the remaining 16 hours of audio to find out.
I wish I liked this a bit more than I did. I really liked the literary/academic mystery. The descriptions were beautiful. I totally lost steam with all the poems and letters though. I can definitely see why people love this, but it just wasn't quite there for me. I'm not sure if having seen the movie first helped or hurt. I think the movie condensed the story in a better way, but I also kept waiting for them to figure things out because I remembered enough of the movie. Overall it's beautiful and I'm glad I read it, it's just not a love for me.
I never do this, but I could not finish this book. On page 166 I decided to put it aside and maybe try again some other time.
I find self-consciously artistic prose like this very wearing. I felt like there were too many nonsensical analogies and metaphors that just felt distracting. I may need to come back to this when I'm in a different frame of mind. If I can love HP Lovecraft and his over-the-top style, why do I stumble over this?
‰ЫПRoland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settled at a different distance, an object of interest, not of choking confinement. He reread his letters. The world opened. ‰Ы_ How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one‰ЫЄs own existence. Nothing in what he had written had changed and everything had changed.‰Ыќ
I've considered Possession one of
my favorites since I first read it
in 1990. Perhaps because I remembered
all the spoilers, this reread was a
little disappointing. Nevertheless,
I enjoyed it very much.