Friday 23 July 2010

READING:Pride and Prejudice and Zombies


"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy.

What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.

Can she vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read.


Before saying anything else about this book,i have to state that i'm a huge fan of Jane Austen's and Pride and Prejudice in particular is one of my favourite books of all time,one that i've read more than 4 or 5 times...

Having said that,one might undertsand why i didn't like this book.I took me forever o read it and since i already knew how it ended and since i early understood that - besides the obvious,the addition of zombies - the only thing that differantiated the original plot from the current one was the replacement of piano abilities with these of using a katana,i was really tempted to put it aside and continue reading something else... But i continued reading,and i'm not glad i did...

First of all,i hated how the author changed the characters of almost everyone in the book.No,changed wouldn't be the right word,he took everyone's character and made it's flaws even more obvious.There were times i thought Elizabeth was a self-centered spoiled young woman,who thought she knew everything and had an almost sickening desire to kill,from zombies to people she knew and loved.Her father was a man who only cared of himself at times and despised his life.Don't mind me,i know that most of those attributes were in the original book,but not with such clarity and intensity.I hated seeing characters i loved beeing altered that way.

Another thing i hated were the unecessary detailed descriptions of how the zombies fested on human brains or the details of some descriptions.I found them repulsive and in no way complimenting a book with so lyrical descriptions.But maybe that's just me.I'm no huge fan of human brain,or a picture of anything eating it,so maybe someone who enjoys those kind of details won't mind.

But what i hated most was that the romance in this book,and let's not fool ourselves,this is,or at least was,a romance book,was amputated.Someway along Elizabeth's lust for kill and those nasty details of killings any attempt of anything romantic was impossible... I've read this book many times and not once did it fail to make me smile like an idiot when at last Elizabeth and Mr Darcy confess their emotions to each other.But not with this book.

Summarizing,there wasn't a single think i liked about this book and i somewhat felt that Grahame-Smith took a masterpiece and turned it to something completely mediocre.But maybe that's just me.Maybe someone who absolutely loves zombies see something in this book that i failed to.I certainly didn't feel that this book needed the addition of anything to become better.The prototype is as great as it could be.

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