It is a mixed bag. There is the antisemitism. The characters switch to untranslated French in parts. Some parts are enjoyable, some parts are boring.
It is funny how the main character Trilby is not widely known today. Svengali is the one who is well know. Svengali is only a small part until we get near the end. But he is the one who has captured popular culture. ( )

I liked this novel much more before a friend told me that it's extremely not feminist. While yes, the main character is an independent young woman, she ends up in the clutches of the manipulator Svengali (inspiration for Son of Svengooli) because, to the author's mind, she shouldn't have been independent and free because she's a woman. Cooties. The author was also an enemy of Oscar Wilde. ( )

I'm not sure what to make of this, it seems to be written for a particular kind of Englishman with lots of references I didn't get and a great deal of untranslated French. The main story is quite tragic but the casual racism and anti-Semitism is hard to take for a modern reader and the constant interjections of the author's voice don't help the story to flow. Mostly notable for the introduction of the character Svengali into the lexicon.

Such was the power of Svengali to mesmerise the world that his name became a word. In brief he takes a tone-deaf girl and turns her into a great diva, as long as she is hypnotised before she sings. Alas at one performance he is incapacitated and as Trilby tries to sing, but cannot - to the disgust of the audience – she is in a strange situation where she is aware of her life with Svengali but has no conception at all of her singing career. In fact this is not exactly how hypnotism works, but never mind that, the idea is fascinating.

If you’d asked me I would have thought the most likely reasons people want to be hypnotised is to give up smoking and to lose weight. Not so! The most asked for thing is this – can I be hypnotised to forget a person?

The uneasy reply is somewhere between a reluctant ‘yes’ and ‘this isn’t the right thing to do.’ What the experts want you to do, apparently, is trash the person you want to forget. There seems here to be a presumption that if you do want to forget them, they deserve to be trashed – ie it isn’t an artificial construct to get you over somebody who doesn’t deserve to be thus treated in your head. So, my first question is, but what if you don’t think that? I know the answer is supposed to be that you are a sucker who hasn’t gotten over a bad person in your life, but that can’t possibly always be true. Must there not also be some chance that this is a fabulously wonderful person and that trashing them as being undeserving in some way is a terrible thing to do? I find it hard to believe this is seen as the healthy option. If it comes down to it, maybe you are a scumbag and he isn’t.

My next question revolves around the idea that you have been hypnotised to forget a person and this has worked. How has it worked? If you forget a person successfully, what impact does this have on the rest of your memories? A person isn’t a discrete unit. He is time and space, sensation, touch, sound, he has a context, a background, he is part of a social setting. You went to dinner with this person and had the most divine meal. What impact does hypnosis to forget the person have on the memory of the meal? Instead of a picture in your head of some wonderful romantic occasion where you shared spaghetti together, you have what? The same picture, but your lover is erased? It is just you and a plate of spaghetti? Is there an empty chair next to you? Has the waiter filled two water glasses? Does the other fork move, but there is nobody attached to it???? Most importantly, do you get more spaghetti in this changed memory than you did on the real occasion? How much is erased with the memory of the person?

Maybe you can do that, I imagine. Maybe the mind’s eye picture of this whole occasion is erased. But add to this, a social setting, for example. Now there are three of you at dinner. How does the removal of one person from the memory of this work? You recall person ‘a’ asking a question but there is no answer because you have erased the memory of person ‘b’ to whom the question was addressed? I can’t see that in forgetting the required person, you would also forget the innnocent bystander, so to speak.

And there are the things that will be fundamentally imprinted on you, in a way spaghetti might not be. (MIGHT not, mark you…) How would you forget the way you made love, slept, woke up? And even if you forgot in a passive sense, surely you would be reminded of them by – well, it could be anything. Putting out the washing and noticing that a cardigan has been undone that isn’t usually and there is a whole memory attached to that. How it was taken off, what happened next. You are made love to exquisitely. It involves all of him, he is completely joined to you. What happens to that? Does it become an Immaculate Orgasm?

Note to self: discuss this with the VM next time in church, maybe she knows. Hey, though. That makes me think. Maybe this is exactly what happened. She shagged someone who was a bad ‘un, a couple of sessions with a hypnotherapist and voila, the Immaculate Conception.
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I read this because it is mentioned in Tender is the Night Published in 1894, it drags on and I did not enjoy it past the first 100 pages. I skimmed the last 20. Might appeal to those interested in period pieces and the restrictive nature of social class in 1800's UK/Paris ( )