The Man of Property: The Forsyte Saga, Book 1

Brilliant writing brilliantly read! Best Audible selection of 50 heard over several years.

... for this masterpiece of writing and narration. Galsworthy's tender, wicked irony is perfectly captured and conveyed by David Case, who is THE master among book readers. Each character has his or her distinctive voice which perfectly expresses the personality Galsworthy intended. The richness of the relationships, the vivid social commentary, the HUMOR, are indeed Nobel Prize material.

I'm now listening to the whole series of nine novels for the third time, and the experience is as rich this time as it was the first. It's more than just fiction. It's a poem, an opera, a feast.

I was first introduced to the Forsyte Sage through the 1960s BBC TV adaptation. This audiobook brings it all flooding back. A wonderful portrayal of late Victorian & Edwardian England. It is true that the opening chapters introduce a vast cast of characters, but the tale settles down and they disentangle themselves with skilled assistance of the narrator who is able to play each character quite distinctly. Highly recommended.

I know this is supposed to be a great series and it is well reviewed by others but I just can't get into this book! I've endured 9 chapters and now I'm just giving up.
The book starts out with SO many characters that I have trouble keeping track of who is who in this family tree. Perhaps it would be better to read the book so that I could go back and review the characters? The reader is very good at emulating all of the different voices but there are just too many characters and details for me to keep things straight. Very little has happened in the plot and I have had to re-listen to much of the book so far just to figure out who everyone is and what is going on.

I've been meaning to read The Forsyte Saga for years, having enjoyed both TV dramatizations (1967 and 2002). And even though I know the story, I very much enjoyed this first book in the saga. Galsworthy gives us a lush, detailed view of late Victorian England's upper middle class and their mania for property and respectability. Like every family, the Forsytes have their secrets and black sheep, and that makes them all the more intriguing. The focus here is the ramrod-spined solicitor Soames and his unhappy wife, Irene. Soames had courted Irene more for her beauty than for love, treating her like one of his exquisite objéts d'art. So determined was he to have her that he promised to let her go if she wanted her freedom. And here lies the crux of the story: Irene is dreadfully unhappy, yet Soames refuses to let her go.

Galsworthy has created a cast of one-of-a-kind characters (or if they now seem like sterotypes, they were one-of-a-kind when first created). There are the senior Forsytes, Old Jolyon, James, Roger, and the aunts; the "black sheep," Young Jolyon, who married beneath him and was cut off by his father; Winifred, married to the alcoholic bounder Monty D'Arty; June, Young Jolyon's philanthropic daughter from a first marriage, and her dashing architect fiancé, Philip Bossiney, secretly dubbed by the family "The Buccaneer"; and many, many more.

There's a reason why Galsworthy's novels were so popular--and why not one but two dramatizations have been made. Quite simply, The Forsyte Saga is a jolly good story. I'm looking forward to moving on to the next six books in the saga.

David Case's voice would might start to grate on my ears--except that it has the perfect haughtiness for these stories.

I thought this book was boring. The only thing that got me through it was the reader David Case who was excellent. I could listen to him read anything.

The Forsyth Saga is so complete, so thorough, so human. Each character is someone with a distinct identity that still resonates with a believable individuality. Even with the weight of so much social and moral complexity (the human condition in the specific), Galsworthy is entertaining, comic and tells a ceaselessly engrossing story. What a master; to maintain all the varying hues and colors of this story of human lives in bathos and in trivia, and weave a cloth that is delightful to behold! I love this great work of nine novels, beautifully interconnected and endlessly full of interest and wisdom. Real them all!

Never!!!! His narration was boring and annoying!,,Maybe the book was not that bad but with this narrator it was terrible!!!!

I have tried 4 times to listen to this book. I love a good long epic or family saga. The naritive and the reader are just so dry and hard to follow. So boring I can not listen past the 2nd chapter and when I do try I have to start over because I really don't follow the story line.
I only listen to unabridged audio and usually listen to 10 hours a day. This is the first book I have bought out of the 400 in my library that I will not even try to read again.

This was a good book, but hard to get into. I did buy the next in the series, though.