The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy

The novel begins with a view of the forests surrounding Little Hintock, a secluded woodland village. A barber from the nearby town of Sherton Abbas travels into the woods to buy Marty South’s beautiful hair, since poverty forces her to sell it. Soon after, Grace Melbury, the educated daughter of a timber merchant, returns home from boarding school. She reunites with her childhood friend and fiancé, Giles Winterborne, whom Marty secretly loves. Grace notices that Little Hintock has changed during her absence, especially with the arrival of the sophisticated doctor, Edgar Fitzpiers, a man from a higher social class who now lives in the district. 

The main story is the complicated love story between Grace Melbury and the humble woodlander, Giles Winterborne. Grace is often treated like property by her father. Mr. Melbury spends a great amount of money on her education so she can become an educated lady, socially above the woodland people of Little Hintock. Because of this sacrifice, he begins to think that marrying Giles Winterborne would waste Grace’s education and social advancement.

Grace is also quite capricious about her future, and I think she is similar to her father in some ways. At times, this becomes a little annoying because Grace always acts like an obedient daughter and rarely stands against her father’s wishes. When Giles loses his house, Grace finally marries Dr. Fitzpiers. She seems relieved because the marriage follows her father’s choice, even though she barely knows the doctor well.

Characters from outside the woodland, such as Mrs. Charmond and Dr. Fitzpiers, look noble and educated from the outside, but inside they are emotionally complicated. Hardy shows a contrast between the simple woodland people and the more modern upper-class people, suggests that rich or educated people are not always better than simple rural people.

The woodland is the main setting of this novel. It is full of tall trees with little sunshine, so the atmosphere feels quiet, lonely, resilient, and a little dark. The district in the woodland area is called Little Hintock. The “woodlanders” are the people who live and make a living in the woods.

After reading The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native, I think Thomas Hardy feels important today because he recorded a rural world that slowly disappeared. He captured the lives, labor, and struggles of English peasants and village communities before industrial modern life changed everything. For example, Giles Winterborne works with traditional cider-maker, Marty South strips bark from trees, and other villagers work closely with timber and forests. In The Return of the Native, the furze-cutters also show the hard life of rural workers. Hardy vividly preserved ways of life that were later erased by modernization.

I do not know how Victorian society valued Hardy’s novels at that time. If we imagine living in that era, people may have read his stories as ordinary accounts of everyday rural life, just as modern people today write about the difficulties of life in the city. But because Hardy’s novels describe a world from more than 200 years ago, it's more interesting to me, reading them today feels like a window to past time.

Ruang Buku Megga Rated : ✬✬✬✬ (4/5)

Title :  The Woodlanders

Author : Thomas Hardy

Publisher : Everyman Library
Year :  1994 (First Published in 1887 )
Format / Pages : Softcover / 400 pages
ISBN :  9780460874595

IVANHOE - Sir Walter Scott

This is an interesting medieval historical tale about bravery and loyalty Set during the reign of King Richard I, who is absent from England while fighting in the Crusades in the Holy Land of Jerusalem, the kingdom is temporarily influenced by his brother, Prince John.

Following the young Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a brave knight who has been disowned by his father, Cedric the Saxon, because of his loyalty to King Richard and his association with the Norman court. The novel begins when Ivanhoe secretly returns to England after joining the Crusades. Disguised and wounded, he soon becomes involved in a grand tournament where he must fight against powerful Norman knights. With the unexpected help of the wealthy Jewish merchant Isaac of York, Ivanhoe is able to obtain armor and a horse to participate in the tournament. 

The story is slow-paced, but it has many unique and memorable characters that make the novel enjoyable to read. Although the plot is quite simple, the characters are very interesting. The character who touched me the most was Rebecca of York because of her courage, intelligence, and exotic beauty, which make her stand out from the others. The novel shows that medieval society still saw Rebecca’s advanced medical knowledge as something strange and taboo instead of trying to understand it further. People in high ranking in Church quickly judged her as a witch while believing they were defending Christianity, even without clear reason or evidence.

Even though he is stubborn and skeptical about the Crusades, Cedric of Saxon sincerely believes in protecting the dignity and memory of the Saxons, he also shows fairness and kindness toward Jews as a marginalized group in medieval society. The novel also contains memorable villains, especially Brian de Bois-Guilbert, whose obsession with Rebecca creates much of the story’s tension, while Prince John and his followers represent greed, ambition, and corruption in medieval society.

Honestly, I felt battered reading this classics, the narration is so vivid but there are so many outdated and rarely used words, and the conversations are often overly convoluted (I am sorry that I am cheating with google translate while reading). Ivanhoe has too many characters involved at the same time, which makes the story feel crowded and sometimes hard to follow. I an little bit surprise how this book commented about the crusade in holy land Jerusalem in Palestine, through Cedric, the writer pointed out that he did not agree about crusade, how people commit bloodshed and then calle it "the will of God"? Walter Scott is partly satirizing how Europe romanticized distant holy wars while neglecting problems at home.

“Palestine!” repeated the Saxon—“Palestine! how many ears are turned to the tales which dissolute crusaders or hypocritical pilgrims bring from that fatal land! I too might ask—I too might inquire—I too might listen with a beating heart to fables which the wily strollers devise to cheat us into hospitality; but no—the son who has disobeyed me is no longer mine; nor will I concern myself more for his fate than for that of the most worthless among the millions that ever shaped the cross on their shoulder, rushed into excess and blood-guiltiness, and called it an accomplishment of the will of God.”

This novel portrays the enmity between the Normans and the Saxons after the Battle of Hastings, as well as the prejudice of the Normans toward the Jewish people. It was truly an enjoyable story, even though the setting takes place 500 years before the time when Walter Scott was writing. I have always been a fan of medieval historical fiction, so it was no surprise that I immediately connected with the novel. With its good pacing, engaging storyline, and interesting characters, Ivanhoe feels very well balanced.

Ruang Buku Megga Rated : ✬✬✬✬ (4/5)

Title :  Ivanhoe

Author : Walter Scott

Publisher : Wordsworth Classics
Year :  October 2019 (First Published in 1819 )
Format / Pages : Softcover / 464 pages
ISBN :  -

Review: Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak

The story of Doctor Zhivago is a portrayal of Russian society under the immense tension of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Through the perspective of a doctor, Boris Pasternak allows readers to witness not only the brutality of war, but also the fragmentation of human life during one of the most chaotic periods in Russian history. Set in early 20th century, Newly married Yuri Zhivago is sent to the front lines as a paramedic, leaving behind his family in order to save others amidst the devastation of war, but What Yuri finds in war completely collides with his inner life.

Yuri Zhivago, the son of a wealthy but troubled family, grows up under the care of the Gromeko family after spending part of his childhood with his uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, whose philosophical ideals later shape Yuri’s worldview. The novel mainly revolves around the complicated relationship between Yuri Zhivago, Tonya Gromeko, and Larisa Fyodorovna (Lara). 

Larissa “Lara” Fyodorovna Antipova (née Guichard) is a teacher and nurse who moves to Moscow with her mother, Madame Guichard, and her younger brother, Rodya, after the death of her father. As a teenager, Lara becomes entangled in a secret and emotionally tormenting affair with the powerful and unsettling lawyer Komarovsky. Hoping to escape his influence, she later flees to Yuriatin with Pavel “Pasha” Antipov.

At first glance, the story may appear to be a romantic drama set during wartime, especially because many film adaptations emphasize the love story. However, the novel itself is far more political, philosophical, and deeply concerned with the fragmentation of human existence during revolution and civil conflict. The narrative first tells Yuri and Lara’s lives separately, as if they are unconnected. However, the war eventually brings them together,  Yuri as a doctor and Lara as a nurse.

The war dominates most of the narrative. Beginning with World War I, the story later moves into the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War between the Whites, who represented the old imperial order, and the Reds (the Bolsheviks). Through his brilliant and vivid writing, Pasternak exposes the horrifying brutality of war in painful detail. Many scenes are difficult to stomach because they remind readers that such atrocities truly happened in history.

Yet despite all the violence, Pasternak constantly inserts moments of humanity, love, poetry, and spiritual reflection between the battles. Yuri Zhivago is not portrayed as a heroic patriot seeking glory for his country; instead, he longs for his family, personal peace, and inner freedom. In contrast, Pasha Antipov dreams of becoming a revolutionary hero and willingly sacrifices his family for ideology and ambition. This dualism between Yuri and Pasha becomes one of the novel’s strongest contrasts.

Because I am a woman, I find myself more interested in, and perhaps romanticizing the love between Yuri and Lara. The first time Yuri notices Lara is when he helps her mother after her suicide attempt by poisoning, and from that moment I already sensed that he was drawn to her. Yuri’s love for Lara feels magical, almost beyond physical reality, something spiritual and transcendent. Lara becomes the person who awakens Yuri’s passion for poetry, inspiring him to write.  

I wonder why classic Russian literature so often emphasizes unhappy marriages while portraying “free love” as something rare and once-in-a-lifetime. Perhaps wether these writers wanted to create a more tragic and emotionally complex atmosphere, or wether the unhappy marriage is become common at that time, because it's conflicts with duty and social expectations. Knowing that Yuri’s marriage to Tonya was partly shaped by his obligation to the Gromeko family and by Anna Ivanovna’s wishes, as a way to stabilize his life and secure his social position, makes the contrast between Tonya and Lara feel even more poignant. 

And, I also wonder why many classic Russian novels often feel spiritual, and heavily philosophical. In Doctor Zhivago, this atmosphere is reflected through Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, Yuri’s uncle, a former priest and prolific writer who later becomes connected to revolutionary ideas. He becomes one of the first major intellectual influences on Yuri, shaping the way Yuri thinks about life, spirituality, and human freedom. However, as the story progresses, Yuri seems increasingly against the violent reality of the revolution itself. I think Yuri is not completely against the idea of change or justice, but he is deeply against bloodshed and ideological violence. As a doctor and poet, Yuri values individual human life more than political ideology.

Though I did not fully go deeper into Nikolai’s philosophy, one of his quotes stayed with me:

........the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. Bear in mind that this is still extremely new. The ancients did not have history in this sense. Then there was the sanguinary swinishness of the cruel, pockmarked Caligulas, who did not suspect how giftless all oppressors are. They had the boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. Ages and generations breathed freely only after Christ. Only after him did life in posterity begin, and man now dies not by some fence in the street, but in his own history, in the heat of work devoted to the overcoming of death, dies devoted to that theme himself.  

Ultimately, Doctor Zhivago is not simply a war novel or a love story. It is a story about how history crushes ordinary people, while war becomes an obstacle separating people from their loved ones. In the middle of suffering and chaos, love and pain are transformed into poetry, and the human soul struggles to survive  while still holding on to the feeling that life has meaning despite historical destruction. 

If you have read Tolstoy, this work feels pretty similar to his novels. Pasternak follows the Tolstoyan tradition of Russian literature, combining history, philosophy, spirituality, and deep human emotions into one powerful story.

"....but now I think that we’ll gain nothing by violence. People must be drawn to the good by the good." 

Ruang Buku Megga Rated : ✬✬✬✬✬ (5/5)

Title :  Doctor Zhivago

Author : Boris Pasternak

Publisher : Vintage Classics
Year : September, 2011 (First Published in 1957 )
Format / Pages : Softcover / 544 pages
ISBN : 9780099541240