I have never been so moved by a work of fiction as much as by reading ‘Bridges of Madison County’. I have seen the movie earlier and with Clint Eastwood being my most favorite director, I immediately fell in love with the movie. But, it was later I got a chance to read the book. Pretty late that was.
Somehow all through the book, I was feeling that I was there at Iowa watching Kincaid and Francesca go through the pains of love. It was as if, I was wanting to butt in at some point and say, ‘Guys, enough is enough, please get the f*** out of Iowa and go somewhere’. The pain was so terrible.
The book was just not about love between two people, but more about the pain of a parent / spouse who needs to make a choice between love of her life and the institution of marriage.
Marriage sometimes gets into inertia. A protracted custom! All marriages, or for that matter all relationships are susceptible to that. Custom brings predictability and thus comforts. So it is a kind of internal struggle between comfort and breaking the monotony. The reasons that Francesca gives are so very right that even the last Cowboy ‘Kincaid’ could do nothing but yield.
The last letter is a work of art and I don’t think there could be a more tearful and honest account of oneself expressed elsewhere anytime. Somehow I was also moved because I felt I saw a lot of similarity between myself and Kincaid that the book appealed to my inner senses more than any other book.
Like Kincaid I also
Value Privacy and am a loner by nature
Like Dogs and Outdoors
Mourn about the loss of “free range”
Occasionally write
Believe that am an artistic and intelligent soul
Always wanted to play a guitar like him, but yet to though.
I feel can also call myself a Last Cowboy. The book is so earthy and characters are ordinary who actually grow big later because of the deeds they do or what they stand for at the end.
Robert James Waller could not reproduce this magic again, though ‘Slow Waltz in the Cedar Bend’ was fairly close, only issue being that the book runs for 30 more pages after the story ends.
The epilogue he attempted for ‘Bridges’ through ‘ A Thousand Country roads’ was a disaster. As it is, if you have landed up with your magnum opus on your first work of fiction, you are going to fall flat in the other works. But choosing to do an epilogue is actually suicide.
I felt like I lost Kincaid in that book. He was not the same guy he was in Bridges. The only romantic moment being the potential chance meeting of Francesca and Kincaid at the Roseman Bridge, which never happens and the tragedy is mercifully allowed to continue.
As Times aptly reviewed the book, ‘Roads has none of the pounding passion of Bridges but twice the pathos--it's a book about aging, a reprise in a minor key. Or put another way, it's less about the bridges, and more about the water under them."
Somehow all through the book, I was feeling that I was there at Iowa watching Kincaid and Francesca go through the pains of love. It was as if, I was wanting to butt in at some point and say, ‘Guys, enough is enough, please get the f*** out of Iowa and go somewhere’. The pain was so terrible.
The book was just not about love between two people, but more about the pain of a parent / spouse who needs to make a choice between love of her life and the institution of marriage.
Marriage sometimes gets into inertia. A protracted custom! All marriages, or for that matter all relationships are susceptible to that. Custom brings predictability and thus comforts. So it is a kind of internal struggle between comfort and breaking the monotony. The reasons that Francesca gives are so very right that even the last Cowboy ‘Kincaid’ could do nothing but yield.
The last letter is a work of art and I don’t think there could be a more tearful and honest account of oneself expressed elsewhere anytime. Somehow I was also moved because I felt I saw a lot of similarity between myself and Kincaid that the book appealed to my inner senses more than any other book.
Like Kincaid I also
Value Privacy and am a loner by nature
Like Dogs and Outdoors
Mourn about the loss of “free range”
Occasionally write
Believe that am an artistic and intelligent soul
Always wanted to play a guitar like him, but yet to though.
I feel can also call myself a Last Cowboy. The book is so earthy and characters are ordinary who actually grow big later because of the deeds they do or what they stand for at the end.
Robert James Waller could not reproduce this magic again, though ‘Slow Waltz in the Cedar Bend’ was fairly close, only issue being that the book runs for 30 more pages after the story ends.
The epilogue he attempted for ‘Bridges’ through ‘ A Thousand Country roads’ was a disaster. As it is, if you have landed up with your magnum opus on your first work of fiction, you are going to fall flat in the other works. But choosing to do an epilogue is actually suicide.
I felt like I lost Kincaid in that book. He was not the same guy he was in Bridges. The only romantic moment being the potential chance meeting of Francesca and Kincaid at the Roseman Bridge, which never happens and the tragedy is mercifully allowed to continue.
As Times aptly reviewed the book, ‘Roads has none of the pounding passion of Bridges but twice the pathos--it's a book about aging, a reprise in a minor key. Or put another way, it's less about the bridges, and more about the water under them."
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