I discovered Poldark with the airing of the dramatization on PBS. After the season finale cliffhanger, I decided I don't need any extra stress in my life, so I took out the books to assuage my fears.
While the television series is quite well done (the characters on the screen are near identical to those in the text, with the exception of Demelza being quite dark on the page while cast as a fair-skinned redhead, but Eleanor Tomlison is so cute I have no other quibbles), I have become devoted to the paper version.
Winston Graham grasps the entire emotional register—happiness, pathos, humor, drama. He depicts the exhausting vagaries of daily life two hundred years past.
What I find brilliant is his ability to accurately depict what can go through women's minds (suspiciously accurate?). When a husband and wife are at odds, he explains, to near perfection, how such misunderstandings can happen. When A thinks she is being considerate, while B believes she doesn't care. Frustrating stuff like that.
There was a large gap between the first three/four books and the rest—twenty years, and he picks up exactly where he left off. The series was published over a course of 57 years.
I'm not near to finishing, yet could not wait to announce the find. I love book sagas that continue over generations, as this does. Of course, now that I'm reading the books, I'm doing that annoying thing while watching the series: "But in the books they . . ." and finding the book-version better.
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