[Ghoulish Delight]

Yay, I'm done!

A lot's been said, don't know if I can cover all the ground I want to, but I'll give it a stab.

The short response is, I didn't like it. I appreciated it, but didn't like it. I enjoyed the style of the prose, and as a reactionary piece to the romanticism of the time, it's highly successful. But as entertainment, not for me.

I'd argue against labling it a "realistic" reaction to romanticism. To me, equally unrealistic as flowery romantic notions and perfect heroines overcome by the power of love is a town full of characters without a single redeeming quality. I find an entire population characters with no humanity or sympathy as uninteresting and unbelievable as characters with no flaws. It was clearly Flaubert's purpose to go to extremes in sending up the trappings of romanticism, and I was never one for extremes. So it's no surprise that I didn't enjoy it.

Like I said, I liked the writing, it was just the subjects and the characters that I disliked. It's been mentioned here how often the characters were bored through the first 3rd of the book. My dad's aunt has a saying, "Only boring people get bored." So to me, all that boredom was the result of boring characters. So it was no surprise to me that, even when stuff did start happening, stuff that should have resulted in excitement and intrigue, it remained boring, because it was happening to boring people.