I’m reading Demon Copperhead and I’ve only just realised that it’s based on David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Somehow, I feel cheated. I hated Dickens in school - melodramatic claptrap - but it does explain the ‘serial’ feel of the book. It’s a clever book, the characters are credible, going beyond characterisation (another of my pet Dickens’ peeves.) And the writing is beautiful, wonderful imagery etc.
I know there’s nothing new under the sun and all tales are variations on a theme. This book, though, barely even changes the characters’ names.
I’m so disappointed. I don’t know what to think. And I’ve lost interest in finishing the book. Have you read it? What are your thoughts?
It’s one of the best books of the 21st century. I cannot wrap my head around feeling “cheated” by what Ms. Kingsolver achieved here.
Yes, fair comment. I was really enjoying reading the book and I’m three quarters of the way through. I don’t know whether it’s my bias towards Dickens, or the fact that it won the Pulitzer Prize whilst being so closely aligned with a classic novel that has me so out of kilter. The writing is brilliant, and I’m in awe of Kingsolver’s skill in the craft.
I’m open to discussion on this and am genuinely looking for opinions from others. When I saw that ALL of the characters were lifted from the original, with only nominal changes made to the names it felt, to me, like a brilliant and clever cut and paste, as opposed to a unique creative work. Have you read David Copperfield? Is it even necessary to do so? I wish I didn’t know the book’s provenance. I want the book to stand on its own, without reference to Dickens. And I may be missing the point. Hence the post.
I have read David Copperfield and no I don’t think it’s necessary at all to read that first or at all. I don’t care for Dickens, personally; I find it often rather obvious that his books were initially published as serials which paid him for length and not quality. I guess I feel he’s more important to literature than he is an author of good literature.
The characters are mostly 1:1 replacements for Dickens’s characters, but this is an essential part of the recipe for the magic Kingsolver weaves on the page. She aims to show the reader, who believes themselves to understand Appalachia its people (but, in actuality, doesn’t at all) what it is like to live there, how it feels to leave and come back, what its people go through — often due to the machinations of outsiders’ deliberate actions.
David Copperfield is the lens Kingsolver uses because it’s familiar to the audience, if not directly at least in form and feel. However, this is where the similarities end. Kingsolver rips all substance and detail from Dickens’s work and instead uses it as a sort of adapter to pour a vision of Appalachia, otherwise unavailable and totally foreign to the reader, into our minds.
I honestly believe that it is the most deserving Pulitzer for fiction in recent history and Ms. Kingsolver’s best work.
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