This book is very serious. It shows an experience of a life of extreme poverty that is hard to take. In addition, it explores that moment when you make a new purchase and have the experience of its newness, and wonder if you are satisfied with it. In this book, the purchase is a new wife. This woman is better than any of today’s modern AI assistants. She knows what needs to be done (without being told) and sets herself to do it without making any comment about it. Perhaps she is like one of those automatic robot vacuums, but better because she also provides physical comfort in the bed. At first I didn’t want to read this book, but seeing a way to relate it to modern life has made me more interested. This book at first pulls you in with a tale of positive hope, but then things turn bad. There are extreme choices that the people have to make. It’s far too sad to want to read, and I am not sure I will continue to the end. I am not an emotional person who would want to cry while reading a BOOK! I avoid heart touching books, but this book is not written in an emotional style. It’s only the details of life that make it sad. So it feels like the sadness sneaks up on you. I read more only because I am a little invested in the characters, especially the wife. Here is a sample of the sad conditions in the book: “In the village they are eating human flesh,” he whispered. Through everything the man experienced, the wife is shown to be a good purchase. She is smart and always knows the right thing to say or to do to help him. I think it was written this way to contrast the negative view of women in the world at that time. In the book, girls are not thought of as valued members of the family. They are just a mouth to feed until they are sold away for the money. Only male children are desired because they are supposed to be strong, and capable workers. The wife shows by everything she does that she is more than just a thing to have sex with, or someone to keep the house clean. Unfortunately, as the wife improves the fortune of the man and he becomes rich, he starts to feel he needs the type of wife a rich man would have. His plain, ordinary slave wife is not good enough anymore. After everything she did for him! Also, after all of the book I had to read through, watching him struggle through poverty, I can not now watch him become a stupid rich fool! I refuse to keep on reading as now every choice he makes is bad and disrespectful to his wife! This book could have just had a happy ending where a poor man gets money and lives happy every after, but it does not. It goes way past there. Apparently rich people get bored being rich, and it causes them new problems.