Hello friends of this beautiful community, a beautiful place where we can share our reviews on the various books we read, but above all for me it is the first time so correct me if I make any mistakes.
Martin Eden in my opinion is more than a novel because how many times have we stopped to ask ourselves what is the point of all this, especially when we put so much effort into it, at work but also on our passions such as perhaps creating a YouTube channel as I did, to review books, and try to affirm values but as I have often noticed in social media we unfortunately clash with superficiality, falsehood and hypocrisy and it was precisely this situation that pushed me to read Jack London's book Martin Eden, Of course I read it in Italian but surely there will also be in other languages.
This in my opinion is a true masterpiece of American literature and it is not just any book even if someone has defined it as very complex but in my opinion it was not that complex more than anything in my opinion it was a sort of autobiography of Jack London drawing from his experiences and putting his thoughts not only in the protagonist Martin, but also in other characters.
Surely, reading this book, what is still striking today is that despite having been written at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is its authenticity and emotional and thought depth that still makes it a very recent book, as if it had been written today.
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It deals with many universal and still current themes, such as social criticism, individualism, personal growth, success and failure. As I was telling you at the center of the novel is Martin, a young sailor initially driven by the desire to climb the ladder of society, in particular to make himself worthy of the woman he loves and meet social expectations. But his journey Unfortunately is much more, gifted with an innate curiosity and feeling somehow defective he wants to escape from a punishment of miserable ignorance. Martin is not a simple "social climber" but is driven by a real thirst for knowledge.
It is probably thanks to his self-taught self-training path, which leads him to an incredible and magnificent intellectual awakening. In the book we can see his transformation in the way he expresses himself and in his reasoning and we witness How his vision of the world radically changes through this book we understand that at the beginning he undertakes this path to be worthy of his beloved but then he will change his thinking by acquiring autonomy through a sharp critical sense, Beyond the bourgeois social conventions.
Unfortunately this situation for Marti who will have enriched himself intellectually, will make him find himself in a limbo situation In fact he will no longer feel he belongs to the working class from which he has distanced himself but he cannot even be part of the publishing class to which he once aspired, having discovered its superficiality, hypocrisy and materialism.
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We will understand that this situation will lead him to a form of disappointment, loneliness, alienation. The story powerfully suggests that pure individualism, devoid of social ties and goals that go beyond personal ambition, can be destructive. This will lead us to reflect on the meaning of ambition, success and wealth if we are not Loved for who we are and if sincere emotional bonds are missing.
So in conclusion I can say that if you are looking for a read that makes you think deeply, that questions conventions and that speaks to the soul, in my opinion you cannot miss this masterpiece.
Thank you for reading. See you next time