Happt to say goodbye to Ibsen

Book seven done. But it was a terrible ordeal.

The Master Builder and other Plays is a collection of four of Henrik Ibsen's lesser known plays: 'Rosmersholm', 'Little Eyolf', 'John Gabriel Borkman' and the titular 'The Master Builder'.

Now, I have never read Ibsen before I tackled 'Peer Gynt' as book six of this reading adventure and I can't say I loved that well known work so I guess it shouldn't surprise me that I didn't get into Ibsen's B-list collected here.

Trouble is, I liked the B-list plays better than 'Peer Gynt'. That, of course, isn't saying much.

Okay, so I have to learn to accept that Ibsen's characters will be broadly drawn, that their behaviour will be melodramatic to say the least, that the plots will be rooted in 19th Century politics and social mores. That they will revolve around a single, central male figure whose neuroses will wash over the female characters who surround them.

But I don't have to like it.

I found these plays to be stilted and over-wrought. And too long.

If Ibsen has one talent I can find to admire, it is the ability to imagine very interesting relationships (both familial and psychological) between and among his characters. But they all come down to serving the master. Who (spoiler alert) generally dies at the end.

Perhaps that's why, of the four, I found 'Little Eyolf', the least objectionable. The play's death scene takes place early and the characters manage to find an interest approach to addressing the impact of that death.

Next up, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, an 18th century comic travelogue that is, mercifully, quite short.