Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Up until yesterday I had never read a sentence by Thomas Hardy. There were reasons for this. First, our English 11: The Novel course focused on Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and because I found the cover creepy, I did not make it one of my three (out-of-five) picks for my high school English requirement.

Second, the 1979 trailer for Roman Polanski's screen version of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) was even creepier. This is a film whose whispering yet insistent voice-over ended with the line: "Tess: a victim of her own provocative beauty."

Brrrrrrrrrrrr!

And so it was yesterday evening, while walking back from Save-On (three 750ml bottles of San Pellegrino for $5), that I stopped at the second-hand store on the 1300 block of Kingsway and saw a relaxed cover of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and thought, I need to spend more time looking into what ails me. A dollar-fifty and four blocks later I was sipping vodka sodas to lines like:

On this board thirsty strangers deposited their cups as they stood in the road and drank, and threw the dregs on the dusty ground in the shape of Polynesia. (63)

"And we'll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live with her; and we'll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!" (65)

Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for audition, so that his sister's abstraction was of no account. (69)