Wow, I was just about ready to give this up about 100 pages in. The lengthy flowery descriptions of Greece were starting to annoy me:
...floating under Venus like a majestic black whale in an amethyst evening sea...
and the story was taking a long time to get anywhere. I remember thinking 'why has it taken 50 pages to get to the island?', and the untranslated passages and obscure literary references felt like the boorish kind of intellectual snobbery the book was attacking! But I stuck with it, and couldn't put it down for the final third. I picked the major plot twist fairly early, and then Fowles managed to convince me I was wrong - brilliant. I felt as Nicholas did, struggling to separate fact from fiction. The end was crushing, although the latin translation of the final words leaves a clue. Highly recommend it, I'll be thinking about this one for a while.
Couldn't see how this could work as a movie, and woody allen's quote confirms that suspicion. I'll probably watch it anyway.
4 stars.
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