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I love George Eliot’s writing. I was reminded of this one when I saw that @mouse was reading it and went to see if I had a copy. I found it, then I couldn’t put it down. (I’m very suggestible when it comes to George Eliot and Jane Austen) Where Austen is almost all sparkling dialog, I love Eliot’s descriptiveness, the way she captures the feeling of a place down to the dirt and the rocks. The characters are relatably weird and superstitious; the cultural norms and beliefs that shift from village to village make me nostalgic for an unconnected world. Morality in the story is very black and white but that gives it the quality of a fable. It casts Silas Marner as a kind of spiritual figure, an outsider who becomes the moral center; kind of a conduit for the metaphysical life of the village.

I quite enjoyed this, the story moves along, it's varied and intricately drawn with gritty details. I felt at times like i was reading Dashiell Hammett, but with ghouls and elves and goblins. i think some of the subtleties of the world Addison creates were lost on me because i haven't read the Goblin Emperor. (can't say i wasn't warned.) I liked the names and titles of the characters; they have a nice musical ring to them, but again, i felt a like i was in the deep end of the pool trying to keep all of them straight in my mind. I think it'd be worth reading again this after i read the GE.

First of all, I love an epistolary novel. can it still be epistolary if the letters are all one way? i think so... Also nourishing to the music nerd in me. At one point it made me think of Pynchon, though i'm not really into Pynchon. something about the pop-mysticism that runs through the story.