Book #16 Completed! "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy

Well, what to say about this gem of literature......

I got nothing witty. The book is about this young farm maiden named Tess. Her father is a lazy drunk which makes him different than me by the "being her father" and "drunk" parts. It is set in England sometime in the latter half of the 19th century (meaning no cars so we get to hear about horses and carriages again). Anyway, Tess is this farm girl who is known for her beauty but not much else. Aforementioned father likes to hang out in bars, get drunk, and lament about the lot he drew in life and how his family was once a proud/noble family in England.

Anyway, they hear of this family down the road a ways that has a similar last name and Tess goes to meet them. Along the way she falls asleep at the wheel of the horse, crashes into a mail delivery wagon, and thus kills her family's horse. This just goes to show that you should never let teenagers drive. She goes home to their dirt farm to get beat by her parents or whatever and then takes what equates to a cab to this other family's house.

Or that is what I think happens because at this point I was zoning out on this piece of crap because stupid people bore me to death. Regardless, she gets out to this other family's house. Anyway, family is a blind mother and a creepy cousin (the actual relation is not perfectly established but for creepiness sake we will say they are related). Cousin offers her a job but Tess gets the vibe that she is going to get called into the bosses office a lot for some extra side work if you get my point. Instead she hits the bricks and goes back home. A lot of "oh woe is us" goes on and thus she takes up said job at creepy family's' house. Well, not too long after she is out on the town drinking and in going back home with her "cousin", she gets date raped by him.

Ok - of course she gets knocked up because, remember kids, it only takes once (or sitting on an unclean toilet seat or a magic bullet from the civil war or - and I sh*t you not.......well, I probably should not tell that story but it involved one of the dumbest questions I have ever heard a co-worker ask another co-worker but that was a long time ago - pre-internet and pre-common sense - I guess I could say that the answer was something to the effect that the "two systems are completely unconnected and regardless your stomach acid would kill anything" or something to that effect). Anyway, she has baby, baby is sick, baby dies. Tess runs off to a farm and becomes a milk-maid. Like milking cows just for clarification since I saw another direction once could go in once I typed that. She meets a boy. Her and boy flirt and said boy wants to marry her (again, this is before the days of automobiles and apparently the idea of the "test drive" was invented). Tess is smitten with boy but feels that she cannot marry him because of her scandalous past. He persists. She writes him a letter explaining why she cannot marry him and slips it under his door one morning. Said boy never mentions the letter and she assumes that he read it and does not care. On the day before their wedding she questions why he never mentioned the letter and goes up to his room to find that the letter ended up going under the carpet by the door so he never saw it. She gets panicky and tells him that there is something he should know before they are to be married and he brushes her off and tells her that they will confess all of their sins the next day.

So they get hitched and that night he confesses to her that he had spent two days whoring in London during his youth. She confesses that she had a child and it died. Apparently there is some double standard because he gets distant and removed from her at this news. They separate. She goes back to her parents shanty and he decides it would be a lovely idea to travel to Brazil to start a farm there. Anyway, she leaves parents house and goes to work on another farm while said husband is out in the rain forest. She does not hear from him. After a bit, she runs into previous mentioned cousin, who had no idea she had been pregnant and pushes for them to get married (really, I just don't know what the laws were back then). She resists but he browbeats her into going away with him. Said husband returns and he tracks them down in some other God forsaken town. She tells him that it is too late and he has been gone too long. He is discouraged. Tess changes her mind and her solution is to stab said cousin to death and run away with real husband. Of course, the law is looking for them so they are on the lamb. They end up at Stonehenge and the law catches up and arrests her.

Now, Tess - in a "WTF?" moment, tells husband that her younger sister has grown up to be a pretty hot girl and would it not be nice if they were to be friends and, well, if one thing led to another and they became "more than friends", then that would be delightful too because it would be like he was still with her. Really????

And then they kill Tess. Justice has been served. The end.

I would say that the only reason why you should read this book is if you are required to do so for school. Even if that were the case, I would highly recommend stealing from my blog and maybe some website with quotations from the book to throw your paper together because there are so many other/better things you could do with your time. As such:

Vroom (1 out of 5 "Vroom's" on the motorcycle scale of awesomeness)