'Gone with the Wind'

I was reticent to take on this book because of the length. I like reading but books of incredible length (700+) cause me to lose focus most of the time. I decided to take Gone with the Wind slow and steady: 100 pages per week. Done in 10 weeks.

I was done in seven only because it's the most compelling piece of shit of all time. It's 100 times more interesting than than the film or at least from what I remember. I don't quite know what I liked the best. Scarlett O'Hara is one of the most horrible cretins in the history of fiction. She's a woman of complete and utter contradiction in every sense of the word. She's strong and yet the most vulnerable. She's forgiving yet can hold a grudge like no one else.

There's Rhett Butler: Provincial antebellum's overly-sexual anti-hero. The strong and intelligent Mammy. The loving and faithful Melanie. The stupid and resourceless Ashley. It's a cast of characters as flawed as much as they're endearing.

Margaret Mitchell published it 75 years after the start of the American Civil War and three years before it was made into the most celebrated film of the medium.

What was most interesting was the peek into certain attitudes pertaining to the change (the culture "gone with the wind") brought on by the Civil War. I celebrate novels like The Remains of the Day, which is fiction about the end of England's colonial reign over the world and the veritable destruction of the country's upper class and big houses. Gone with the Wind is no different. The Civil War wasn't just a cleansing by blood of a young country: It was the outright tearing down of Southern culture. Not just slavery. Not just the young men dead in the ground. Not just the ruined cotton crops. The South was devastated not unlike Germany after World War I. The idea of the "south rising again" is not so ridiculous as a direction reaction to the Civil War.

Although the north was more than hated, the ideas of the hapless Ashley and Rhett, both who realized how tepid he Southern cause was and how wasteful the death and destruction of the Civil War was. They were the voices of reason amid a crowd of extremely emotional humans that thought pure grit would gain them victory even if arms and manufacturing were uneven.

Although correct, it would not have made any difference (tensions had been brewing in this country for 50 years) and I am of the camp that believes the Civil War, for all its evil, was completely necessary. It set things at zero.