It starts off grim and then gets really grim. ( )

La oscuridad está en Sue... Ella es la oscura. Por lo demás, excelente y conmovedora novela. Muy recomendada.
Jude Fawley es un joven de origen campesino cuya principal aspiración es acceder a tener unos estudios, para lo cual no escatima esfuerzos aun cuando se emplee en el oficio de cantero. La consecución de sus ilusiones, sin embargo, se verá afectada por sus relaciones, primero, con la desenvuelta Arabella Donn y, después, con su viva e inteligente prima Sue. Los impulsos y las decisiones de Jude irán complicando de forma creciente y trágica su trayectoria vital hasta un desastrado fin que rubricará, precisamente, la oscuridad de su existencia. ( )

I was invited to read this book as part of a group of other Goodreads members to participate in close reading of Jude the Obscure. This has been a real eye-opener to me as I am always glad to read in areas I am not familiar with and 19th century English literature is one of those areas I simply ignored. I am actually more familiar with Russian literature than English as it was required reading for my degree program in college.

Regardless, Thomas Hardy's novel is a pleasure to read. It is always a little bit challenging getting used to a previous century's writing style but once I did this book took off for me, both because of Hardy's enjoyable writing style and the story of Jude. I honestly can say I looked forward to coming home at night and reading this book and will be seeking out more of Hardy's novels in the future.

The group reading has been an education. There are a lot of people with more experience than me in reading classics like Jude the Obscure and the comments and suggestions about the deeper meanings of the story and the characters has been very interesting to read. We aren't quite done and will wrap up soon with a discussion of the final two chapters.

Thank you, again, to Ken for the invite and I hope we can do more of these together. ( )

Hardy's last, and perhaps saddest, completed novel. While all who love the studied lyricism and social insight of Hardy will not find this novel wanting, the heavy burdens of institutional fatalism require me to caution readers about trying to bring this volume into bedside with your lovers for its romance--it has none.

The main character is a well-developed as a pro(t)agonist. Jude Fawley is a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main agonist is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is his recurring love interest. The novel brilliantly describes the 18th century Victorian issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage which, for obscure and quite inexcusable reasons, remain robust today.

Jude Fawley lives in a village and labors with the hope of entering university. Jude, like many of us, is born lonely, horny and relentlessly naïve. He is seduced by Arabella Donn, a bold but superficial local girl who traps him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. The marriage is a failure, and Arabella leaves Jude and later emigrates to Australia, where she enters into a bigamous marriage. Hardy is highlighting the inability of the Poor to perform up to the pieties expected by "law" and society.

After Arabella leaves him, Jude moves to Christminster. Still working as a mason, he studies subjects hoping to enter Oxford. He meets and falls in love with his pretty and spirited cousin, Sue Bridehead. Jude introduces Sue to his former school teacher, Mr. Phillotson, and he marries Sue, despite the fact that he is some twenty years her senior. She soon regrets this marriage. Sue is in love with Jude, and is horrified by the notion of sex with her husband. Curiously, Sue asks Phillotson for permission to leave him for Jude, and he grants this permission. Phillotson understands she cannot fulfill what her marital duties to him since she loves Jude. The marital rift is a scandal—but it is Phillotson's willingness to allow his wife to leave for another man—which forces Phillotson to give up his career as a schoolmaster. Wessex in 1890s.

Sue and Jude live together without marriage or any sexual consummation. Sue apparently fears both sex and marriage. She "shudders". Soon after, Arabella reappears having fled her Australian husband, a hotelier in Sydney.
Arabella and Jude divorce and she legally marries her bigamous husband, and Sue also is divorced. However, these legalizations resolve none of the anguish. Arabella reveals that she had a child of Jude's, eight months after they separated. The boy is named Jude and nicknamed "Little Father Time" because of his intense seriousness and lack of humor.

Jude, back to the mason father, eventually convinces Sue to sleep with him and, over the years, they have two children together and expect a third. But Jude and Sue are socially ostracised. They are not married.

Jude's employers dismiss him because of the illicit relationship, and the family is forced to move from town to town seeking employment and housing before eventually returning to Christminster. The child, Little Jude comes to believe that he and his illegitimated half-siblings are the source of the family's woes. The morning after the family arrives in Christminster, Little Jude murders Sue's two other children and kills himself by hanging. He a note that simply reads, "Done because we are too menny. " [sic] Shortly thereafter, Sue has a miscarriage.

Beside herself with grief and blaming herself for Little Jude's actions, Sue turns to her religion long rebelled against. The children's deaths appear to be divine retribution for her relationship with Jude. Arabella discovers Sue's feelings and informs Phillotson, who proposes they remarry. Sue leaves Jude again for Phillotson, and she has sex with him as her punishment. Jude is devastated. Arabella plies Jude with alcohol and once again tricks him into marriage.

In the middle of an ice-storm -- described brilliantly -- Jude makes one final, desperate visit to Sue. Jude becomes seriously ill and dies within the year in Christminster. His hopes for love and learning, and decency and family, are failures. Sue grows "staid and worn" with Phillotson, the lively spirit utterly annihilated. Arabella fails to mourn Jude's passing, but steeled by pragmatism, prepares to ensnare her next suitor.

I highly recommend reading this, and all of Hardy's novels and poems, for their mix of clinically scientific observations and glimmering magic, always "rich and strange", glowing with consciousness. We need this vision. ( )

A truly magnificent bummer. ( )