Vanity Fair: Official ITV tie-in edition

This is a thick book but has good binding. Easy to read as it is a floppy paperback. Great cover.

Genial

Obra rara, que recomendo, papel bíblia, fino, mas confortável e com algumas gravuras. Obra clássica na língua original. Muito rara e em poucas unidades. Capa dura, e um romance da era vitoriana memorável.

Maravilloso trabajo de la editorial.

For years I had been putting off reading Thackeray's magnum opus, "Vanity Fair." Not that I dreaded reading it-in fact, quite the contrary, as I knew that what awaited in its pages was surely a treasure trove of wit. But since it is lengthier than your average novel (800+ pages in the Penguin edition), I waited to read this, choosing to reserve it for a time in my life when I could do so uninterrupted and with the utmost leisure. This set the stakes quite high, and I had my apprehensions that perhaps they were a bit too high. (I've been disappointed before with a handful of other books that I had put off reading but which ended up not being what I had expected.) Wow, did Mr. Thackeray ever deliver! This book was absolutely worth the wait and, in fact, exceeded my expectations!The novel chronicles the fortunes and mishaps of two childhood friends, Amelia Sedley and Rebecca Sharpe: one a hopeless romantic, the other an incorrigible opportunist. Come along with them on their unforgettable journey (or puppet show, as Thackeray would have us view it) as they graduate from charm school, marry, endure the Battle of Waterloo, bear children and much more! Of course, no Victorian novel of this magnitude would be complete without a diverse cast of supporting characters: the dutiful Capt. Dobbin, the narcissistic civilian Jos Sedley, the petulant and slowly-dying Miss Crawley, the reproachable Lord Steyne, the vociferous Mrs. Peggy O’Dowd and many others.For Thackeray, each character fits squarely into the ambient setting which he calls Vanity Fair, in homage to Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a place meant to satirize pre-Victorian England (and its successors). Vanity has two distinct meanings here, which Thackeray so carefully weaves together. On the one hand, the people of Vanity Fair are vain in the sense of being egotistical. Their ego requires satisfaction whether by a position in society, or wealth, or the love of a woman; as they strive to attain one or more of these, they must conceal their object-in-view from everyone else. It is this other sense of “vanity” that Thackeray satirizes; i.e., futility. All these attempts at conniving, dissembling, and then arriving at one’s end never yield long-term happiness.Thackeray’s style is inimitable and perhaps may best be described as playfully sardonic. He is rarely ever serious and uses hyperbole to no end. This style sets him apart from his contemporaries. Where Hardy is tragic, he is realistic; where Eliot is subtly deprecatory, he is outwardly so; where Dickens longs for Christianity, he revels in being a heathen. And of course, one of the most recognizable devices in his writing is the tangent, never without purpose and always without apology. Some of these may be readily skipped over but some are worth reading, if only to get a good laugh. Indulge Thackeray in some of these and you will not be disappointed!