Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy

Rating: +

Review:
I like Thomas Hardy, so I was predisposed to like this book, but I liked this even more than I thought I was going to. The back cover of my edition said something to the effect of "the book that scandelized the victorian world", and I can imagine why it was called that (I thought that they probably would have been exaggerating). At its heart, this book is about what it means to be married to somebody and how one makes the decision of whether to marry a particular individual.

The plot of the book follows the life of Jude from the time that he is a small boy being raised by his aunt and gets himself an education and his first job. He starts life being very naive. He wants to be educated so he gets himself a series of menial labor jobs and spends the money he earns buying texts to learn Greek and Roman and reading classics. He dreams of moving to the nearest city with a university and actually getting an education and he saves up his money at a series of jobs in order to acheive this goal. However, along the way he meets a girl who is working on a farm and ends up married to her, partially because of his own naivite about how relationships between men and women and marrage work.

From here, Jude's life goes downhill. He cannot pursue his dream of being educated and support his wife at the same time. He and his wife are not at all suited for each other and they don't like the people that they become when they are around each other. The question, then, is - should they stay married? Given their feelings for each other, and the fact that their marriage is based on a lie that the wife told, are they really married to each other anyway? The distictions between being legally married and being morally married are explored, as we see Jude and his wife meet the people that they are "meant" to be married to, each of whom are married to other people as well. Each of these four relationships captures a different facet of these questions.

The book was a bit slow moving, both because it explores each of the choices that characters make in depth and there are a number of relationships to be followed over the course of many decades. But I was interested in all of the characters, particularly Jude and the woman that he loves, who are the two main characters in the book. The writing was heavy and a bit archaic, but I don't mind that. There is a lot of philosophizing in this book, both in the thoughts and words of the characters and occasionally as part of the narration, but I was very interested in the arguments that were being explored. I also think that the discussion was being held on terms that remained interesting and pertinent even today.