The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Fine Psychological Supernatural Horror Dr. John Montague has rented Hill House for three summer months, because it is isolated (the closest people live six miles away) and reputed to be haunted. He's out to conduct a scientific investigation of the paranormal there for a book that should knock the socks off his peers. To accomplish this, he’ll need "assistants" to corroborate (if not to catalyze) supernatural phenomena, so he's sent invitations to people with relevant experience. Two agree to participate. First comes Eleanor Vance, a self-conscious, friendless, unfulfilled, sensitive, and highly imaginative 32-year-old virgin--imagine an Anne Shirley who never met Diana Barry or Gilbert Blythe! When Eleanor was twelve, her father died and for three days stones fell from the sky on the family house. She has spent the last eleven years of her life taking care of her invalid mother, and now that the woman has died Eleanor is a free agent (though her unpleasant big sister and brother-in-law sure don't want her driving the family car). Second to arrive is the vivacious shopkeeper Theodora, who lives in a world of "delight and soft colors" and once laughingly broke a laboratory's record for identifying hidden playing cards. She's at liberty because she recently had a terrible fight with her roommate climaxing in the destruction of the gifts they had received from each other. Joining them in Hill House is Luke Sanderson, a wealthy and rakish young man due to inherit the pile. His aunt figures that she's gotten "the liar and thief" out of trouble for the summer by forcing him on Dr. Montague. As soon as Eleanor arrives at Hill House she senses that "it was . . . not a fit place for people or for love or for hope" and hears "the sick voice inside her which whispered, Get away from here, get away." Instead of following that advice, she musters all her "moral strength" and, repeating the lines of a song, "journeys end in lovers meeting," steps onto the veranda of Hill House. There she is "enshadowed" by the house, which she feels "was waiting for her, evil, but patient." If you don't like horror stories in which people do stupid things like enter obviously inimical houses … As the other participants show up at Hill House, and Dr. Montague recounts its history and legends, and inexplicable and disturbing things begin happening there, we realize that Eleanor is the worst person in the worst place at the worst time (or the best person in the best place at the best time). Where will it all end? Are they dealing with one ghost or multiple ghosts or a sentient house or all these? Why is the space before the nursery so abnormally cold? Why can't Eleanor enter the tower and its library? What do the house and or its ghost(s) want with her? What does she want with them? Is it all in her head? It can't be, because Theodora, Luke, and Dr. Montague all perceive many of the same supernatural manifestations as Eleanor. And yet… In The Haunting of Hill House (1959) Shirley Jackson excels at psychological horror, putting complicated people in situations attuned to their needs and weaknesses. The book has interesting things to say about fear, as well as about loneliness and the limits of friendship in stressful contexts. She unveils our unflattering impulses, as when we experience a momentary desire to physically or verbally slap someone we really like. She's very aware of how and why groups turn on weaker members. She's also very funny: even before the comedy relief entrance of Mrs. Montague and her right hand man the schoolmaster Arthur, who believe themselves to be supremely sensitive to the supernatural while remaining pompously oblivious, Luke, Theodora, and Eleanor often engage in witty whistling in the dark repartee and flights of fancy. The reader of the audiobook, Bernadette Dunne, gives a fine reading, although perhaps her male voices tend to sound the same. I've never forgotten watching the first movie adaptation, The Haunting (1963), when I was nine, because the part where Julie Harris as Eleanor holds what she thinks is Theodora's hand for comfort terrified me into a night of wakefulness with bedroom lights on. So I was curious to find out what the original novel would do to my middle-aged self. I found it to be more morbidly fascinating, ambiguous, and sad than scary. Instead of writing scenes of sensational and graphic violence ala Hellraiser et al, Jackson makes us care about the emotional and mental distress of her main characters. Eleanor is so pathetic in her yearning to belong and so sensitive and imaginative that it's hard to draw the line between what she wants and what Hill House wants. I recommend the book to people who like well-written psychological supernatural horror without graphic violence, expensive special effects, complete explanations, or happy endings. View all my reviews
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Call for the Dead: A George Smiley Novel by John le Carré
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "A game played with clouds in the sky" Call for the Dead (1961) is John le Carre's first published novel and the first featuring his spy George Smiley, a neat protagonist. "Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition," toad-like with a tick in one eye, he's no handsome spy of action ala Ethan Hunt or Jason Bourne or James Bond. He's an expert in obscure, 17th-century German poets, and posed in pre-WWII Germany as a scholar-lecturer while really serving as a talent-scout for potential spies. Now during the Cold War he's working for "the Circus," a fictionalized British Intelligence, as a home-based Intelligence Officer without expectation of promotion. He's been divorced by his beautiful upper-crust wife Lady Ann Sercomb and is still imagining what she'd say in certain situations. He's intelligent, possessed of a quick and powerful memory, and an astute judge of human nature and character. No idealist, he's aware that his work has encouraged his "bloodless and inhuman" side and left him somewhat hollow. After establishing Smiley's character and history, the plot of the novel begins when Smiley learns that the Foreign Office civil servant Samuel Fennan has committed suicide. Just the day before Smiley interviewed Fennan to let him know that he was not under suspicion from an anonymous letter referring to his Oxford University days' communism, and he knows that the man couldn't have felt that his career was in jeopardy or his loyalty questioned, so he doesn't believe the suspiciously typed suicide note. Smiley interviews Fennan's widow Elsa, a "slight, fierce woman in her fifties with hair cut very short and dyed the color of nicotine," a Jewish woman with a slight German accent and the atmosphere of the concentration camp survivor. After talking with her, he knows that she lied to him, but he also cannot believe that she could have killed her husband. That said, (perhaps partly thinking of his wife) Smiley does muse, "However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing." He has also become cynical about the concept of the state: "State is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don't they and imprison people?" Then he considers his return to work as going "back to the unreality of containing a human tragedy in a three-page report." Enraged by his smooth head of service Maston not wanting to believe Fennan's death was a murder and very aware that "intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors," Smiley resigns and tries to solve the mystery on his own, enlisting the aid of just-retired policeman Mendel and spy colleague Peter Guillam. This leads to painful realizations about Smiley's past and a suspenseful climax involving a theater, the Thames, and the suitably opaque London fog. Call for the Dead is a compact and potent tale of espionage and murder, with a convincing set of characters and a complex (rather dark) vision of human nature and governments and bureaucrats and spies and the nations they're working for. No cardboard completely evil villains or completely good heroes here. Fans of literate murder mysteries with a political, espionage bent should like it. Audiobook reader Michael Jayston is excellent as the narrator and as the different characters, whether British, German, male, female, working class or Oxbridge. View all my reviews Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (2017) by Richard Lloyd Parry3/21/2018
Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone by Richard Lloyd Parry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "The sense of power discharging at the end of pain".... Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (2017) by Richard Lloyd Parry is an absorbing, terrifying, and moving book about the March 11, 2011 Tohoku, Japan earthquake and tsunami and its aftermath. Parry bases his book on his six years of interviews with survivors and on his two decades of life in Japan. He recounts what happened on that day, the terrifyingly alien and yet supremely natural nature of the tsunami (a black mass moving at over 40 mph with the dust of demolished buildings floating above it, crunching and swallowing the human world in its way, killing 99% of the 18,500 Japanese who died after the quake), as well as the psychological devastation of the survivors who lost children, parents, spouses, siblings, friends, houses, work places, and villages. Parry focuses much of his account on what happened at the Okawa Elementary School when 74 of 75 children and 10 of 11 teachers died in the tsunami, "the single grossest tragedy of the whole immense disaster, a distillation of its arbitrariness and horror." Why were the children kept waiting at the school after the earthquake instead of being led to safety up the hill right there? What exactly happened at the school during the 51 minutes before the tsunami struck? Such questions may never be completely answered, due to the small number of survivors, the subjective nature of memory, the desire of the school board to avoid responsibility for negligence, and the refusal (or inability) of the one surviving teacher to consistently (and honestly) say what happened. One of the most moving and unexpected parts of the book concerns the divisions that arose in the Okawa Elementary School community in the aftermath. These divisions came about due to the different degrees of loss different families experienced and to their different responses to the losses. Some parents wanted to forget the horrible tragedy and move on, while other parents fought for years to find out what happened. As Parry writes at one point, "It is easy to imagine grief as an ennobling, purifying emotion--uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illuminating the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn't resolve anything. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, and cracks into gaping chasms." Another moving and unexpected part of the book is the intense presence of the supernatural. Despite the title and the Japanese affinity for ghosts, I didn't expect to encounter so many ghost sightings and possessions in the book and especially not to believe them deep beneath my rational, conscious mind. A woman's ghost sitting down to tea with her surviving neighbors and leaving the cushion wet; a taxi driver giving a lift to a fare whom he eventually noticed had vanished from his taxi; a young nurse being possessed by a series of ghosts of men, women, children, and even a dog; a man publishing ghost stories in his magazine and hosting ghost story meetings. . . Regardless of my lack of belief in ghosts, Parry's accounts of the widespread phenomenon in Tohoku are by turns moving or harrowing and always feel real. The book is also full of interesting and telling features of Japanese culture, like the following: -The ingrained desire to live by ethics of "gaman" (quiet endurance) and "ganbaro" (let's do our best). -The inevitable feature of life that are natural disasters, requiring "gaman" and "ganbaro." -The reluctance to stand out from the group. -The political apathy and stagnation stifling Japanese democracy. -The vision of death not as a negation of life but as a continuation of it different from but connected to living (as with the cult of ancestors). The book is well-written: tight and vivid, engaged and objective, as in the following description: "Today, though, the school was the first thing Hitomi saw, or its outline. It was cocooned in a spiky, angular mesh of interlocking fragments, large and small--tree trunks, the joists of houses, books, beds, bicycles, sheds, and refrigerators. A buckled car protruded from the window of one of the upper classrooms…. The village, the hamlets, the fields, and everything else between here and the sea had gone." One of the themes of the book is the difficulty and importance of imaginatively experiencing the suffering of others. On the recent anniversary of the natural disaster, I felt ashamed that even though I'd been living in Japan for 15 years, I didn't pay enough attention to the earthquake and tsunami when they hit, because of my geographical distance from them, my preoccupation with the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant there, and my reluctance to empathize with victims and survivors. Seven years later, I tried to rectify my failure of courage and imagination by reading this book. It couldn't fully convey what it would be like in a moment of terror to lose one's child and or family and or home to a natural disaster (especially one exacerbated by avoidable human error), but it deeply affected me, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to know about such things, especially in the context of Japanese culture. Parry ends his book with a gripping account of the last exorcism by the priest who had exorcised a series of ghosts from inside the nurse. The last ghost brought to the light was that of a girl who'd died in the tsunami. At the moment of exorcism, the priest felt "pity at her lonely death, and for the twenty thousand other stories of terror and extinction," but his wife "was aware only of a huge energy dissipating. It made her remember the experience of childbirth, and the sense of power discharging at the end of pain, as the newborn child finally enters the world." View all my reviews
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Entertaining and Light Confection of Gods, Ghosts, and Brothers "Fat Charlie" Nancy is an unambitious, self-conscious, London-based accountant who lets his fiance Rosie postpone sex till after their wedding and lets his future mother-in-law (who hates him) plan their wedding when, after attending the funeral of his estranged father Mr. Nancy in Florida, he learns not only that his father was the trickster story-telling spider god Anansi of West African and Caribbean mythology, but that he has a brother who received all of the god power in the family (hence Fat Charlie's middling life--he's not even really overweight). Back home in London, Fat Charlie gets drunk and, acting without belief on the advice of a family friend, sends a message to his brother via a spider. Almost immediately his brother, named Spider, shows up on Charlie's doorstep. Spider is an anti-Fat Charlie, using his godly powers of persuasion, instant travel, and the like to play the smooth operator and serial user and forgetter of people. Soon he's upset Fat Charlie's safe little life, making his brother regret his impulsive arachnid-call. Will Fat Charlie ever be able to marry Rosie, who seems smitten by Spider? Will he become the fall guy for his entertainment agency boss' cheating of clients? Will he ever again see Daisy Day, the free-spirited police detective he met after a night of wild wake activities led by Spider? Will he ever get rid of his brother? Will Fat Charlie's bargain with the Bird Woman be a minor or a major mistake? As Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys (2005) progresses, it answers such questions in an enjoyable, entertaining, and funny way (apart from a brutal murder), with numerous humorous asides, similes, references, and the like. It has some great imaginative scenes of fantasy, ranging from the nightmarish (the Bird Woman's scenes with Spider) to the sublime (the place at the start or end of everything where the animal-human gods dwell). Gaiman writes some vivid, comical descriptions, like of Fat Charlie suffering a hangover ("the kind . . . that an Old Testament God might have smitten the Midianites with") or Mrs. Dunwiddy stuffing a turkey with cornbread ("with a force that would have made the turkey's eyes water if it still had any"). He nails the voices and styles of the four elderly black Caribbean women who once loved Mr. Nancy and feel responsible for what happens to his sons. There's something similar (though much more limited) here to what Gaiman does in American Gods (2001) in introducing gods into our contemporary world, as well as some ghost stuff that doesn't seem to belong with the gods. I think Anansi Boys is lighter in mood and heft than the earlier novel, and the ending verges on being too tidy and corny, and I regret that we never learn how Anansi tricked Tiger out of all the stories in the world (unless I missed it somehow), but fans of Gaiman and fantasy set in contemporary urban settings should like the book. View all my reviews
Thirsty by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Consumer Culture, High School, Vampires, and H.P. Lovecraft Massachusetts small-town high school freshman Chris has a crush on Rebecca Schwartz. Being an imaginative, shy boy, he only indulges in romantic fantasies in which they do things like wear black clothes and attend cool art exhibits. He's been feeling uneasy and tetchy, quarreling with his best friends, Tom (handsome and potentially one of the cool kids at school) and Jerk (good-natured but simple-minded and benignly ostracized). Is he merely going through the hormonal overload of all adolescent boys? Or is he. . . turning into a vampire? One of the neat things about M. T. Anderson's Thirsty (1997) is that he feeds those two metamorphoses into each other. Another is that he links them to American consumerism, as represented by, for example, fast food like McNuggets and Big Macs and vampire fare like potluck human casserole. Thirsty presents a 20th-century America (or at least Massachusetts) full of vampires, none of whom do like the Twilight Cullens and live on animal rather than human blood and protect mortals from bad vampires. No romanticizing here. Anderson's vampires are malevolent serial killers of human prey, and when humans catch one they lynch it with stake or fire, not wanting to waste time and expense on a trial. None of this bodes well for Chris' future with his family. The vampires worship a Lovecraftian lord by the name of Tch'muchgar who is imprisoned in a hellish world, while the mortals of earth (or at least Massachusetts) perform annual sacrificial rituals to maintain the dread being's imprisonment. Chris' community sacrifices goats, the neighboring town virgins (an example of Anderson's pointed humor is that the night before the rituals teenagers from Chris' town travel by bus to the neighboring one to try to take advantage of those kids' desire to not be virgins on the next day). The major plot of the novel concerns a vampire plot to free Tch'muchgar to enter our world. As is usual with vampire novels, in service to his story Anderson picks and chooses which genre features he wants to avoid or use or modify or invent. His vampires for instance become long-fanged and invisible in mirrors only when angry or thirsty, are fine in daylight, have the strength of ten men, heal with supernatural speed, and fall into comas without drinking enough human blood. Anderson muddies this Nosferatu water by tossing in celestial beings and their opposites, as well as fairies, changelings, witches, and warlocks, though only the vampires and celestial and anti-celestial beings play roles in the story. Anderson's black humor high school vampire novel is unpleasant. The characters are unappealing, especially the first person narrator Chris, who in the face of his nightmarishly alienating transformation becomes increasingly ineffectual, passive, and self-pitying. This grim and bleak novel lacks comfort. And that is one of its strengths! I admire Anderson's refusal to cater to usual YA reader needs and expectations and his probably quite successful attempt to make them think. Anderson avoids typical young adult romance adventure vampire tropes and tricks like romantically teaming the hero up with a girl to save the day, or easily demarcating between good and evil, or tidily resolving everything. And he excels at capturing the voice, thoughts, and emotions of an American adolescent boy and the way that American teenagers tease each other and form groups and do reckless things and scorn their parents. The book is often very funny, partly because Anderson captures young Americans' speech (idioms, insults, sarcasm, slang, and over-use of "like"): "Are you boasting?" I ask. "I have something to boast about. You're hyper. What the hell is your problem?" "I do not have a problem," I say. "My problem is the fact that you're doing this male boob-boast maneuver." Anderson also effectively depicts the stress of becoming a vampire, as when Chris is intensely relieved to see his reflection in a breakfast spoon, or listens appalled by how grotesquely and noisily humans like his family eat dinner, or watches the blood "skating through his [brother's] skin as he sleeps. Thirsty resembles Anderson's later novel Feed (2002), which also features a flawed first-person present tense teenage boy narrator protagonist who is likely to lose the struggle to do the right thing. I think Feed is a better book, because it's more straight sf (about our unhealthy dependence on Internet media), while Thirsty loses some impact (for me) with its evil lurking beneath our real world and supernatural anything goes streaks, but both books display Anderson's salutary satire of the domination of American culture by mass media and consumerism and superficiality. Both books potently express what Chris thinks at one point: "We have to fight to remain human." NOTE: Some Goodreads reviewers say the book is an allegory for gender identity, with Chris being a homosexual unable to come out of the closet as a result of his society's (and family's) prejudice against homosexuality, but I don't see a single hint as to his being even unconsciously gay, for he really has a crush on Rebecca and regularly daydreams about her but never about any boys. View all my reviews
Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth by Naguib Mahfouz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Lord of the beautiful, O beautiful One" Naguib Mahfouz' Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth (1985) is an interesting novel about the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who shook the Egyptian Empire in the 2nd century BC by founding a new religion--possibly the world's first monotheistic one. To tell the story, Mahfouz sets a young man named Meriamun on a quest for the truth behind what happened by interviewing fourteen people who knew the "heretic" Pharaoh, including a high priest, a counselor, a general, a sculptor, a princess, an epistoler, a physician, and a chief of police. The composite story thereby told depicts the Pharaoh's youth as a prince, his strangeness and charisma, the death of his older brother, his estrangement from his parents, his marriage to Nefertiti, his becoming Pharaoh in 1353 BC, his establishment of a new religion based on his own sun god Aten ("the one and only God" of love and light), his attempt to end the worship of all other deities, his removal of the capital from Thebes to a brand-new city he had built to become the center of his new religion, his fostering of a new art style free from traditional conventions, the brief period of happiness and prosperity in the new city, the increasing civil unrest and external pressures that led to his being replaced as Pharaoh by Tutankhamen, the repurposing of the new city into a prison for the former Pharaoh and his wife, and the resumption of Egypt's millennia old traditional polytheistic religion. Needless to say, each person has a different memory and understanding of Akhenaten's attempt to force a new religion onto Egypt. About half of the witnesses refer to him as "the heretic" and describe him as ugly, feminine, and mad, "A vile, low-born man who humbled the strongest of men by his perversity. The drums of war were silenced, the flags of glory lowered; the sound of music ascended from the throne of the pharaohs. I, commander of armed forces, was forced to remain idle as the empire was torn to pieces and gradually fell into the hands of the enemies and the rebels." About half of the witnesses express their admiration and affection for him, "A voice from another world, intriguing yet incomprehensible. How did we become friends? How did my heart become filled with love for him? These are questions I cannot answer." About two thirds of the witnesses condemn Nefertiti, like her half-sister, who calls her a whore. In words Mahfouz must take to heart, Meriamum's father advises the youth to "Be like history, impartial and open to every witness. Then deliver a truth that is free of bias for those who wish to contemplate." Mahfouz is not, however, writing a Rashomon-like account in which each witness is equally believable. I think he has most sympathy for the Pharaoh, whom the sub-title calls "Dweller in Truth." The anti-Ahkenaten people had their own agendas threatened by the Pharaoh and are unpleasant in their expressions of hatred, while the pro-Ahkenaten people are appealing in their affectionate memories. Significantly, Mahfouz gives the last memory to Nefertiti, who reveals herself to be loving, faithful, and sad. She explains her abandonment of her husband after his deposition as her attempt to make him compromise with the overwhelming forces against him, and then points out that their jailers prevented her from communicating with him. The impression we're left with is that although Akhenaten was impractical and unsuited to maintain a big empire in a warring world, he was full of love and hope for a peaceful life. If he was crazy, he was also pure. The novel is not a depiction of daily life in ancient Egypt. Nor is it a suspenseful action story full of intrigue and power struggles. Instead of writing detailed descriptions of food, clothing, housing, work, and the like, Mahfouz focuses on people's good or bad memories of a unique Pharaoh who has already died before the novel begins. However, the multiplicity of biased memories and the perplexity and anxiety with which his parents and advisers and friends viewed Akhenaten are moving, as is the purity of Nefertiti's strengthening love for him and growing belief in his god. Mahfouz, Egypt's Nobel Prize-winning author, is a fine writer, and the English translation (1998) by Tareid Abu-Hassabo is fluid. There are some great descriptions: "One late afternoon, our ship passed a strange city. It was bordered by the Nile to the west, and an imposing mountain to the east. Its buildings hinted of a past grandeur that had given way to a haunting evanescence. The roads were empty, the trees were leafless, the gates and windows closed like eyelids of the dead. A city devoid of life, inert, possessed by silence, shadowed by gloom and the spirit of death." And Mahfouz evokes the sensual numinous: "I repeated the hymn and let its sweet nectar infuse my soul. Its words attracted me as a butterfly is drawn to light. And like the butterfly, I was burned by the light. I was filled with faith." Mahfouz' novel is about the nature of memory, history, faith, love, and truth. Anyone interested in those things in the context of ancient Egypt should like this book. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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