Reviews

Vildanden: skuespill i fem akter by Henrik Ibsen

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vegantrav's review against another edition

4.0

random thoughts:

Gregers: is anyone really this stupid and this much of an ass?

Hjalmar: how could you dispose so quickly and so easily of your love?

Gina: in the face of these astounding revelations, how could you remain so relatively calm and unaffected?

Hedvig: oh, you poor dear girl!

Dark, dismal, and depressing with horribly flawed characters, yet somehow extremely poignant.

ajevi's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

sidharthvardhan's review against another edition

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4.0

Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars, closer to later. Ibsen writes about moral dilemmas like no one else. Here it is dilemma of whether to tell someone a truth that might ruin their life.

And Ibsen seems to have such magical ability to make characters real in your mind's eye in no time. It needs novelists hundreds of pages to develop characters. Not Ibsen. You could know exactly how they are going to act. Some readers seem to think that predictability is a bad thing in fiction. It isn't altogather IMO. I am inclined to think that only bad artists depend on shocks. Ibsen's genuis is in showing that how inevitable the fates of his characters is.

It seems that if we suffer too big a breach on our trust in one quarter, it affects our ability to trust in all quarters. In this case, Ekdal ended up suspecting even his innocent little daughter of having malign intentions.