The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

What a fool that Dowell!

this is an ace book (I hope I used that britishism correctly)

You mean that there is another upside down book at the back?

I couldn't finish Parade's End this summer, alas.

i started parade's end, then lost my copy, then found it again and couldn't bring myself to continue. i lost my get up and go for it.

yeah this book rules. Parade's End is currently lying around my room, I got distracted somewhere in the middle of the third book.

I'm almost finished with Some...Do Not!

Read those books a few years ago and loved them. I keep meaning to dig into ford, he seems an interesting figure ito making things happen but his big books are just a little out of step with what was going on in literary modernism at the time which I guess is why he’s unfashionable? He wrote a shitload tho, I def want to check out some of the lesser known stuff

I read (and did not particularly enjoy) the Coetzee book in which the protagonist is trying to write a thesis about Ford’s lesser-known works and finds them all pretty much worthless.

I remember loving the The Good Soldier, if only because the narrator uses as many commas as I am wont to do.

I loved the Good Soldier and boy do I seriously intend to someday read all of Parade's End. How was Some... Do Not, Alfred?

I read something he wrote about moving way out to the sticks, and gradually becoming aware of layers of coded imagery in folk songs, guarded-to-mysterious allusions, and it occurred to him that these people had been invaded many times, by foreign and domestic forces. Also, his local grocer told Ford that he had all of Hardy's novels; they were the only thing that kept him going.

I think I know that book, Dow, what's it called?

. How was Some... Do Not, Alfred?

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Saturday, July 25, 2020 9:51 PM

I needed the novel to settle in my mind. The foreshortened chronology forces readers to work like prime James even though Ford's a superficially brisker stylist.

xpost Maybe this one? The Heart of the Country. A Survey of a Modern Land, Alston Rivers, 1906. Although I thought it was later than that--=Ford Madox Ford Society mentions recuperating in the Sussex countryside after the war, for instance.

Yes I do think it was after the war that he was gardening in Sussex. But in his bibliography I can't now see reference to the relevant book. Unless it's IT WAS THE NIGHTINGALE?