The Thirteenth Tale
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is such a famous book that I feel absolutely no need to report it. Yet this spring I re-read it in the original language, and I've got some ramblings and favourite quotes that I want to put here.
There is a thrilling plot, of course. Margaret Lea comes to the house of Vida Winter, a celebrated bestseller author, to write her biography. The elderly lady is quite a tough and eccentric person, and her complicated life story will reveal a lot of dark family secrets. The narrative follows both the past and the present, and the outcome is, at the least, surprising, if not shocking. (Here's a nice fan-made clip that is likely to intrigue you.)
Vida Winter's story is exciting, sure... but personally, what got me started was Margaret Lea: a spinster and a bookworm, traumatised and obsessed, who 'was more at ease with dead people and was, if the truth be told, nervous of the living'. All the characters in the book are more or less weird, but Margaret the book geek appeals to me especially. I can't help liking the one who says, for instance:
I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous. (Note the wry sense of humour!)
And I can well understand that feeling:
And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
About authors and their creations
[Vida Winter asks Margaret at one moment]:
'Have you ever seen that picture of Dickens in his study? It's by a man called Bass, I believe... In the picture, he has pushed his chair back from his desk and is drowsing, eyes closed, bearded chin on chest. He is wearing his slippers. Around his head characters from his books are drifting in the air like cigar smoke; some throng above the papers on the desk, others have drifted behind him, or floated downwards, as though they believe themselves capable of walking on their own two feet on the floor. And why not? They are presented with the same firm lines as the writer himself, so why should they not be as real as him? They are more real than the books on the shelves, books which are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness.
And that one is not to be missed:
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humour, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. (Seems there is nothing new in this thought, but I love the twist that follows...)
As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.
I would read the book for the sake of such moments only. I appreciate the intricate nature of the plot, but it doesn't really hold as much fascination over me as such 'literature musings' do. The case is, when you read the book for the second time and do not have to worry about the plot anymore, you're bound to notice more things that are at first overshadowed by all the exciting or revolting mysteries. For instance, there is, again, that idea of change, which is so common to British 20th century literature. The old family mansion is asymmetrical, strange, with distorted proportions: exactly like the lives of the degenerating aristocratic family who once inhabited it. The idea of incest is probably necessary to accentuate the staleness, hopelessness, and futility of the old ways. At the same time the old house holds a strange fascination over Margaret; she sees some odd beauty in it... but she is glad to learn that soon it is to be demolished, a beautiful modern hotel to be built in its place. New life comes to supplant the old.
Avid reading, for Margaret, and avid writing, for Vida Winter, are ways of escaping from the reality that traumatised them. For the elderly lady, the release is, obviously, in death. With her demise, all traces of the old story are obliterated; it is the turn of the new - and surely Margaret will eventually learn to live with people? Re-reading The Thirteenth Tale has helped me to realise that, actually, it is a book that is not so much dark and gloomy, but very... optimistic. :)