Silas Marner

Silas Marner (Dover Thrift Editions) by George Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a book assigned to me to read in grade or high school. Unfortunately, I faked my way through it and never actually read the book. But when I heard how much the other students enjoyed it, I always had a bit of regret about not reading it. So I’ve finally read it.

This is the story of Silas Marner, the wronged man that becomes a lonely miser and how he is brought back to a world of love and interaction with others. There are several other themes running alongside the main story of regret, how past wrongs cannot always be corrected, letting the past go, etc.

I have to say, I am really fond of the story. It was uplifting, with a good message. But it only rates 4 stars because I found the dialogue to be frustrating. Eliot’s descriptions and narratives are gorgeous, with beautiful lines like “Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings”. But this is offset by Eliot’s need to give the characters strong accents that he renders into the characters’ dialogues phonetically using nonstandard spellings. I found it very distracting. Often I felt like I was trying to translate a foreign language instead of simply absorbing a beautiful tale. Besides the frustrating dialects, I greatly enjoyed the writing and story.


Kindle Edition: Silas Marner