Tag: 3/5

“The Golden Bowl” - Henry James

The Golden Bowl - Henry James

“The Golden Bowl”, in short, is about a young, naively innocent woman (Maggie Verver) and her rich father (Adam Verver) getting engaged (almost simultaneously) to two Italians (the prestigious Prince Amerigo and the staggeringly beautiful Charlotte Stant) who happen to have had a love affair (of which both father and daughter, of course, know nothing about), and their mingeled relationships.

Maggie (obvously having an Electra complex) neglects her Prince and spends a lot of time with her father, which leads to the Prince and Charlotte spending more time toghether (in lack of better companions) and finally starting an adulterous affair.

Maggie finally awakes from her naivety by finding out about the affair and starts reclaiming her marriage, by intrigating against Charlotte, seperating the Prince and Charlotte, and persuading her father to return to America (the story takes place in London) with his wife (Charlotte) thus also seperating herself and her father. The prince is quite taken by the new, matured, Maggie, and that’s where the book ends.

I can’t say, that I’ve enjoyed this book as much as I usually enjoy books, it certainly is well written and has an interesting style, which unfortunateyl makes it also quite hard to read. The plot is sometimes unexpected but the scope of the story is way to small for me, the implications seem quite limited, the book doesn’t open new horizons. (At least not for me.)

3/5

Why Smallville is actually quite good.

But the real question is, compared to what?

I’ve started watching smallville some time ago (I’m somewhere in season 2 right now) and I’ve so far liked it. It’s exciting, well written and in my opinion finds the balance between comedy and drama.

The recurring characters are all well developed except for maybe Pete Ross, who seems to me just to be the black quy, so that there actually is a black guy in the series. He’s got almost no character, we’ve never seen his parents (as opposed to Lana and Cloe) and he just seems to be the only black guy in the whole town. ;)

I like Lana (she’s gorgeous) and I especially like the Luthors. To me, the Luthors are what lifts Smallville over the average tv-show. Both characters (Lionel and Lex) are very well developed and they aren’t just black an white, that’s what makes Smallville interesting.

The bad guys, however are mostly poorly written, they are for some reason altered by meteor rock (ok so far) and they just turn evil (or they were already). I mean, they turn into psychos, why, I don’t get it. For me this translates into almost zero depth, which is kind of annoying.

The episodes are almost all in the “monster of the tweek” (or ” ‘person who gets in contact with meteor rock and becomes an evil fiend’ of the week”) style. But it’s alright, there are some issues, that stretch over more than one episode, but I would not go as far and would actually call them plots.

One of the must humorous things in the whole series is, that Clark never actually kills anyone, but the bad guys almost always die (they have to, because if they wouldn’t anyone would know Clark’s secret in a heartbeat). The bad guys always kill themselves out of mere stupidity (best example the evil coach, who burns himself alive.) or they die in an accident, Clark never has to make the moral decision to let an enemy live and risk him doing more damage (especially with the ones, that could not easily be contained) or just kill him and be done with it.

So I guess, Smallville is better than expected, better than average, actually quite good, if you don’t compare it to firefly, farscape or pushing daisies, at least.

3/5