Recently Completed #5

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

This is what I've managed to read to the end lately (very lately in one case):

Julius by Daphne du Maurier;
The Secret History by Donna Tartt;
The Letter in the Bottle by Karen Liebreich
and
The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

There've also been some false starts that were abandoned. Not sure I want to write about those. Not sure I want to write about Julius, either, as I read it some time ago and have been hivering and havering over discussing it ever since.

Julius is not a nice book and not a nice character. He has some traits that might tentatively be identified as psychopathic. The only reason to read to the end was to hope he'd get his comeuppance, but alas he doesn't. The worst he seems to suffer is getting the brush-off from a woman he fancies, which, given the way he treats the women in his life, can only be a good thing--for her. The introduction to the book, by Julie Myerson, desperately tries to paper over the issue of how du Maurier handles Julius's Jewishness, but it can't be successfully done for a novel that states more than once that he has racial Jewish character traits. At times I felt very uncomfortable, as if I were colluding with the anti-Semitism in this book merely by reading it. The biggest irony of all being that Julius didn't have a Jewish mother anyway.

I can't recommend this book, but if you can bear the dubious politics and enjoy unredeemed and unrepentant villains, you might want to give it a look. For Julius is a shit of the highest order who refuses to save the life of the woman who (incredibly) adores him, because it would interfere with his plans to buy a cafe.

So, onwards and upwards to The Secret History, a bad novel with a good novel hidden inside it. Too well hidden, alas.

I read this book to the end because it was just interesting enough to hold my attention, and because I wanted to have read it. So many people rave about this book--and it's on so many of those lists where you try to prove you've read more books than your FB friends--that I thought, right, I've bought it and I'm gonna read it. Yeah.

This could have been a much better book. All the elements are there, the characters are there, the setting is there, but the writing isn't up to it. Too much time is spent dwelling on the awful Vermont winter the narrator spends in an unheated attic with a hole in the roof. Vile, obviously, but it has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLOT. Insofar as there is a plot. The book lacks focus, it's repetitive, and it doesn't really know what it's about. A shame.

The book also doesn't live up to the cover blurb about the influence of the charismatic teacher. I'm sure that influence is meant to be there, but it ain't. Fail.

I thought I'd made a huge mistake with The Letter in the Bottle when I read the translation (from French) of the actual letter. It was trying far too hard for my liking. Yes, it IS mean of me to critique a letter written by a grieving mother to her dead child, but given the author of the book and the woman who found the bottle were weeping like rainclouds over it, I do feel permitted to say that it did nothing for me. Too fancy. Trying too hard. Too much emotion in the writer to leave room for the reader's emotions. But then, it wasn't intended to be read.

Liebreich's search for the author of the letter found in an Evian bottle washed up on the Isle of Sheppey is fascinating. There are hilarious interludes involving a tarot reader and a clairvoyant, curious little anecdotes about letters in bottles, and Liebreich's growing frustration with her own inability either to solve the mystery or to leave it alone.

This is a revised edition of the book, issued when the author of the letter came forward. At first indignant and angry, she eventually agrees to meet Liebreich and talk a little about why she wrote the letter and what she expected to come of it. "I thought it would smash in the waves and the fragments of glass and paper would gently disperse through the oceans." (pp 278)

If you can get past the sentimentality of the mother's letter--or if it doesn't even strike you as sentimental, and you think I'm a heartless cow--this is a compelling book that's well worth a read. In any case, here's another interesting message in a bottle story to keep you entertained in the meantime :).

Finally, we come to The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings, which I finished last night. At first, I was disappointed to find that only about half the book was short stories by Gilman, and that the other half was extracts from her autobiography. But when I started to read the extracts, I realised that here--amongst, admittedly, some drek-- was easily the best writing in the book. Gilman's evocation of her experience of 'nervous prostration', ie clinical depression, is heartbreaking. It has even greater resonance than 'The Yellow Wallpaper', a short story which came directly from her own experience of a rest cure that drove her to the edge of insanity.

Anyone who wants someone to know what depression can be like should buy them a copy of this book.

I enjoyed 'The Yellow Wallpaper' very much, in a creeped-out way. Some of the stories are, to be brutally honest, mere wish-fulfillment, but I thought 'The Rocking-Chair' ought to be right up there with other exemplars of the art of the ghost-bordering-on-horror story. Why isn't it? I leave it to yourselves to decide.

Buy this book. But be prepared for printing flaws and general apparent indifference on the part of the publishers to the physical object's quality. Shame on you, Virago. Really.