There was this couple in a town I lived in who gave all of their children intensely threatening names, like 'Repent or Burn' (whom everyone outside the family called 'Rob.') This has nothing to do with anything, except that 'Makepeace' is a rather less offensive portmanteau..
I'm kind of exhausted in advance by the idea of reviewing Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine). I read it as sort of a supplement for my Vic Lit class, and because it's kind of a big deal. Also because I am daft.
.Vanity Fair is long. And I know I've been saying that about a lot of books lately, but at 750+ pages and completely devoid of any sort of puppies, murders, or mad relatives, VF takes the plodding, marathonic cake.
.Becky Sharp is a plucky orphan, but the unsavory kind. Over the course of what feels like an eternity, she acquires a beau and then a position as a governess when that beau fails to beau-up, and then secretly marries the uncle (I think? A family tree would have been handy since everyone is always being referred to as 'the Colonel' and 'the Baroness' and people's positions keep changing as other people die and I forget who is who) of the girls she is governessing, but then falls out of favor with him and becomes poor and drunk and slovenly before meeting up with her respectable old friend Amelia whose (now dead) husband she almost stole and under whose respectability she now cloaks herself before doing poor Amelia a good turn and quietly vanishing at stage left.
.And I maintain my platform that satire is only funny if you are an Expert in the Times. Which is why Gulliver's Travels continues to fail to amuse, and why most of Vanity Fair was beyond my radar.
.Five caterpillars, because it was kind of endearing. It was just...so long!
