The Diary Game 28/04/2021. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
These restrictions also had good parts, in the sense that, out of too much boredom, I opened some books, something I haven't done much in recent years. I particularly liked one and I thought I'd tell you something about it. I recommend it for when you don't know what to do with your free time. A really disturbing book, very difficult, but which still keeps you in suspense throughout the whole reading. I can say that it is the book that touched me the hardest ever…
It's an awkward book in the first place. The action flows slowly, like magma as someone said. An action that stretches over three serious volumes and that has no points of surprise, of startle, in which to be heartbroken. Yet almost unbelievably the book catches you. Slowly, slowly I entered this viscous and sometimes monotonous unfolding of events from which I could not get out. I spent a few nights with the main character I became attached to at the beginning and condemned him at the end. But I understood him. It is not comfortable for the boy you know so much about, whom you have known since childhood, to become worthy of the contempt of reason but still sympathetic in your depths, which will bring you close to tears in the end.
The book is a tragedy primarily of the American dream that will be shattered from the first to the last page of the novel. There is also the tragedy of the mirage in different forms: the mirage of wealth, of love, of religion. The only happy characters in the novel are the rich ones. The only lucky characters are those born into wealthy families. But wealth means first and foremost a welfare state. A status that you have to pull with your teeth, to consolidate it by any means. Happiness means if others think you are happy. Wealth, if others think you are rich. This is what the main character understood and he tried his best to create that much dreamed state. When he almost succeeded, the past, poverty, was brutally pulled back.
Much further back than he had ever been. The thrill of love, the passion for money, the uncertainty of big questions are feelings that pierce us all. But only the rich resist these human weaknesses, ignore them, live them, or overcome them. The poor are also the most vulnerable. In the end, the book turns out to be a very tough one. An American tragedy is the tragedy of the man who discovers that the engine of every action in life is money and the engine of the craziest impulses is love. Religion cannot stop love or the impulse of money.
Moreover, it channels them in the wrong directions. The novel is full of characters driven into life for strange purposes. They are religious fanatics, unscrupulous rich people, political opportunists, incompetent professionals, no flawless characters. That was my tragedy at the end of the book: I breathed a sigh of relief when I came out of that world that had become unbearable but, it's impossible, this real one is just as bad. Quick, let the next book come!