Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 A Novel Without a Hero November 7, 2008
I must admit that I owned Vanity Fair for quite a while before I actually got around to reading it...I kept making attempts but drifted off after a few chapters. However, once I shook myself and forced myself to proceed my interest was quickly hooked. I did already know the story and how everything turned out for the characters beforehand but despite this the novel still gripped. However, be warned! If you like your Victorian literature with a hero, Vanity Fair doesn't really have a suitable candidate to offer. Instead, the sheer joy of the book comes largely from the enterprising social climber Becky and her gleefully unrepentant struggle for the top.
Because of the large number of relatively small chapters involved, its perfect long-term bedside reading to savour.
A true classic.
 Pure class October 18, 2006
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
It really is that good. How much you like this book will depend to a large extent on how much you like the Victorian novel. If you like Dickens, the Brontes, Elliot and the like, then you are in for a real treat, because Thackeray is the best of the lot. Less verbose and rambling than Dickens, less sentimental than Elliot, more ironic than the Brontes, Thackeray is a supreme writer of English - ironic, cheerful and pessimistic by turns, sometimes tender and affectionate then cruel and caustic, he maintains a narrative control that invites the reader to share his moral vision of the hypocrisies and absurdities of Victorian England, and the world we all inhabit.
Vanity Fair has that universal quality of the best fiction - it enables you to see the world in a new way. An hour reading this novel is time spent with a true comedian, someone who sees the grotesque, humorous, admirable, cruel, stubborn, heroic, gentle etc reality of the human condition and can tell it in chapters of the best English since Shakespeare.
A novel written before its time. April 26, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Although a mammoth read, Thackeray has voiced what other Victorian writers felt obliged to conceal. Vanity Fair retains its relevance in today's capitalist consumer society. I believe there is a Becky Sharp lurking within all of us! Best read I have read in the past year.
A marvellous reading April 7, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a marvellous reading of a great book. Jane Lapotaire's ironic and sometimes slightly world-weary delivery does full justice to the comedy of the novel, and listening to her narration made the daily drive to and from work (almost) a pleasure.
Worthy classic but a huge book July 7, 2005
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Worthy classic, enjoyed reading it, but it is a huge book and for modern readers sometimes quite slow moving. Having said that, the story and characters of Vanity Fair still apply today and it deserves its status as a classic quite rightly.
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