Exhaustive but exhausting.
Not too long into this book I started to wonder if perhaps Tuchman was going to cover the life and events of every single person who was alive on this planet during the 14th century. Tuchman covers so much ground, introduces so many events, writes about so many people that by the end I felt as if the entire 14th century had fallen on top of me.
This isn’t a bad book by any means – the fault lies entirely with myself. I’m not cut out to enjoy an endless parade of peoples and events that have no clear narrative. And while Tuchman does attempt to frame the century through the life of one man, de Coucy, I never felt like had a clear enough picture of him or how all the events she talks about truly effected him. And I suppose had she drawn a clearer picture then this book would have become more speculative and less factual which would have been counter to her purpose of recounting the events of this tumultuous century.
I should have known what I was getting into because the title uses the word ‘distant’, as in remote, ‘mirror’, as in a lens, and ’14th century’, as in the entire century and every single event that took place during those 100 years. Yet what I’ve come to realize about myself as a reader is that I prefer the personal over the grand informative, the mundane over the ‘calamitous’, and the microscopic over the macro. I’m far more interested in learning about how events effected just a few people and not the broad, sweeping strokes that effected all of a society. That’s why I prefer literary fiction over this type of nonfiction.
However, Tuchman has produced a supreme work of knowledge and she is an excellent writer. She speaks with humor and wit and is ever lively – even mischievous such as when talking about the pointy shoes – so any failing to not be engaged my this tremendous work is all on me. Yet I still wish I could have gotten a more personal, more minute look at the people who were alive during this century. I felt that after awhile I was watching a parade – Danse Macabre – of tragic life after tragic life. And while it would be unreasonable for me to think many close personal accounts from the century remain (if they ever existed at all), I should look harder to find something that would engage me more than this book was able to.
I wanted to fall in love with this book, but it was far too academic for me, too distant, not nearly personal enough, and overwhelming in scope. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn about the 14th century on the grand scale, but aside from a few points she makes about how religion and death and economics played a role in how people viewed themselves, I don’t feel this book is able to (or was even attempting to) paint a clear picture of what it was to be an individual at the time.
Were someone were to write about the 20th and 21st century 600 years later and only wrote about the major headlines of those times I don’t think we would have any better idea of what it was to actually be alive at the time than what Tuchman does here. Yes we would learn all about the major historical events of the day, but for me (and this is a matter of personal taste) I’m not interested in that sort of thing, I only care about the individuals and how they lived day to day. Most people do not live their lives according to the headlines.
But the failing is all mine. This is a work of historical nonfiction and not a novel and it attempts to show us the entire century. In that regard it is brilliant, it’s just that it’s so much information that it’s hard to keep it all together. So while I can only critique the book that is and not the book as I want it to be then I have to admit this is a wonderful book and an excellent reading on a very distant time. Yet as as an engaging work that speaks to me as an individual, then I have to admit I failed this book because I’m just not cut out for it.