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Every Friday, at 11:00 am, on the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page, the library will stream a brand new recording of local thespian, Joseph Coté reading aloud selections from a wide variety of fascinating and entertaining books of fiction and non-fiction.
For February 7, Coté will read aloud from Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Summary: A haunting study of guilt and lost love
In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper.
Subtitled “A Story of a Man of Character,” Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.
In her 2006 biography of Thomas Hardy, the author Claire Tomalin called the book a masterpiece, a deeply imagined dramatic and poetic work, with a narrative on a grand scale and paced with extraordinary moments. She praised it as being built on the territory in which Hardy worked best, in which the rural landscape is drawn with a naturalist’s eye and in which country people play out their lives between custom and education, work and ideas, and love of place and experience of change.
Hardy’s portrait of Henchard – “depressive, black-tempered, self-destructive, and also lovable as a child is lovable” – she considered one of his strongest achievements. She did concur with Hardy, however, in noting that he tried to pack in too many incidents.
Click the links to find the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page.
Thoughts to share? Book ideas to suggest?
Contact Joseph at friday-explorations@usa.net