Tuesday, February 14, 2017

A Ghost Takes Shape (Rebecca ch. 11-18)

My love for author Daphne Du Maurier only grows.

Once this list of 100 books comes to an end I am absolutely certain I will be looking into more of her novels.  Her sense of pacing and timing is simply impeccable.  Mrs. Du Maurier's word choices and insight into the universal bits of the human condition, and the manner in which she plays on them, is nothing short of masterful.  When most women write women I find myself not caring.  Call it a condition of my gender view, but I find it to be often to over dramatically done, too foreign to my way of thinking, or too forgiving of a female character's flaws.  In Rebecca I find only a perennially relatable character who reacts in completely legitimate ways that any human might to the given situation.

This section of the novel opens with the beginning of a breakdown for our unnamed heroine.  She continues to see Rebecca everywhere, in the rooms she enters, at the table, and even well into the minds and hearts of everyone she meets.  She begins an inevitable slide into a minor form of madness believing she is losing her identity with the knowledge that everyone is comparing her and finding her short to the nearly sainted Rebecca.  She is driven by this need to know her, who she was and how she died but no one wants to speak of her but to praise her.  Finally Maxim's friend, Frank, reveals how Rebecca died, capsized at sea in a boat she often took out alone.

Frank calms the heroine and comforts her, telling her that no one is actively trying to compare her.  He reassures her that Maxim is happy, her own qualities are quite admirable, and that all of her paranoia is unfounded.  Naturally she has to ask if Rebecca was as beautiful as everyone says.  For all his faults Frank is an honest man and declares that she was, "...the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life."

Domestic bliss, or what passes for it at Manderley, continues.  Our Mrs. de Winter continues to act bashful around the servants, even to the point of dashing into the dining room to quickly gather food and duck out so that the help wouldn't feel obliged to serve her.  It's such a strange moment but so oddly relatable to me.  To this day I have a strong aversion to an employee of any business making much of a fuss over me.  I just don't like it.  When we went on a Caribbean cruise there was a formal dinner we had to attend every night with our table having three different waiters for three different purposes.  One poured the wine, one served the meal, and the third was in charge of anything we might need done which included cutting up our meat.  If I'm at a fast casual restaurant I won't even ask for a soda refill if the machine is behind the counter because I don't want to be a bother, and there I am with three waiters for eight people.  I was mortified.  The only way I got through it was remembering the words of Mrs. Macready from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe "That's their function.  We mustn't deprive people of their function."  At a hotel with a free breakfast I get in and out as fast as possible.  If a place gets my order wrong I spend no less than five minutes trying to decide whether it's worth saying anything.  That is all to say...I feel ya sister.

The heroine goes out for a walk to a cove that Maxim had warned her away from earlier and finds a dim witted man who knew of Rebecca's death.  He also tells her that some great secret is being kept and that a dark snake like lady, clearly Mrs. Danvers, doesn't want him to speak on it.  When she returns to the house she finds a car there and a man talking to Mrs. Danvers.  Later she discovers it's a man Maxim had forbidden to ever come to the house while Rebecca was alive thought Rebecca knew the man well.  Plot thickens.

Chapter fourteen is one of the most beautiful and creepy chapters.  Our Mrs. de Winter finds herself in a corridor and dives into an unlocked room to avoid being seen by the servants and made a fuss over.  The room wasn't like many others in that wing.  It was not forgotten and covered to keep out the ravages of dust and light.  It was well kept and cleaned.  Mrs. Danvers and begins to reveal her obsessive behavior towards Rebecca, whose room it was.  This chapter makes it clear why Alfred Hitchcock stood up and took notice, this and the final moments of the eighteenth chapter.  Dang.  Our lady escapes and naturally chalks it up to normal grief rather than something more sinister.

Things seem to be on the upswing again as Beatrice returns to whisk Mrs. de Winter away from the gloom and melancholy.  Beatrice is quite the great soul, on par with Samwise Gamgee when it comes to down to earth thinking and lifting spirits.  She takes her to see her and Maxim's grandmother who has some dementia.  Our lady is quite accepted by the woman who longs to return to Manderley some day, and why has there not been a ball in some time?  The warmth, serenity, and confidence the grandmother engenders is suddenly broken as she calls for Rebecca.  You can almost palpably feel our heroine's pain as the warmth and joy, the possibility of acceptance is wrenched from her.  Beatrice apologizes profusely and our lady puts on a brave face, but the wounds are so much deeper than she'd like to admit.

After she recovers from the shock and grief she considers what everyone has told her, that there should be a ball at Manderley.  Maxim agrees, as long as he doesn't have to be a part of the planning, and plans are underway.  She agonizes over what to wear until Mrs. Danvers suggests that she would look rather fetching in a costume based on a painting.  The death faced woman insists again and again.  With no other ideas our lady agrees.  Come the day of the ball, she realizes that Mrs. Danvers is not as well meaning as she had believed.  What follows, the reaction and the confrontation, I won't ruin for you but Mrs. Danvers pulls an almost Norman Bates style performance that is simply amazing.  You can feel the creeping fear as our lady realizes just what she is up against and why.  *shiver*

Pax,

W

Friday, January 20, 2017

Life In Another's Shoes (Rebecca ch. 1-10)

"Wait.  What happened to 'Catch-22'?"

Oh, it's a thing.  It still exists.  In fact it is still sitting on my bookshelf with the other of those 100BYSRBYD.  The only reason that I'm moving on to the next book on the list is because I couldn't take the inanity anymore.  I spent months trying and months avoiding it by setting parenting magazines and random flyers I received on top of it.  Sure enough it kept peeking out from under the stack with an accusing glare.  "FINE," I shouted and sat down with it for thirty minutes a day for about a week.  At the end of those few days the book magically leapt from my hand, flew across the room and smacked into the wall.

Final Word on "Catch-22":  While I'm sure that it has a place in the great works of literature I don't believe that a slot in the top 20 of the top 100 is deserved at ALL.  This book is pretty much the novel equivalent of many "Palm d'Or" Winners at the Cannes film festival or, indeed, some of the "Best Film" winners at the Oscars.  Often it seems that those films win not because of artistic merit but because it has something perceived as "worthy", a political message or something socially "relevant" to the time.  It is in that same manner that I view this novel.  It has an audience, sure.  The Mary-like deification of prostitutes, the disregard and target abuse of any virtuous character that happens to come along, and the constant Post-Modern message that there is no goodness, there is no virtue, and all your institutions are crap so let's tear them down, violate innocence & goodness, and somehow society will magically hold together since we don't have any constructive ideas; it all coalesced into something I realized wasn't worthy of my time.  I've ranted about Post-Modernism before and I realized that just because the fecal matter is being sold at the market doesn't mean I have to purchase it.  It's a clever parlor trick devoid of any substance.  /rantoff

"Rebecca" on the other hand has been quite a joy to read.  I started it less than a week ago and I'm already one-third of the way through it.

WIKA (What I Know About):  Essentially the only thing I knew about this novel coming into it was that if I was reading it in public, chances were someone would think I was reading a trashy romance novel as opposed to a literary romance novel.  The cover looks as though it is wrapped in scarlet silk, much like rumpled bed sheets, and only the title and author's name besides.  It has all the indications of being a Harlequin novel too hot to put something representative of the contents on the cover.  Yes, I could have gotten a handsome looking trade paperback edition that would be less scandalous looking...but I would have paid 10$ more for the privilege.  Other than that I knew nothing.  I hadn't even heard of the opening line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" which is supposedly as famous as, "Call me Ishmael".  I was ready for a surprise.

The novel begins with something you couldn't get away with in fiction these days; two chapters of tease.  The author spends those two chapters making it clear that they occur long after the end of the book.  It describes the emotional state of two nameless characters who are trying to move on from some unnamed tragedy that has expelled them from Manderley much like the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.

The first thing that grabs me about this novel is the author's writing style.  I'm going to say it right here and right now...I'm in love with Daphne Du Maurier.  I have not "swooned" this much while reading a novel because of spot on word usage to create a mood in a long time.  She is absolutely fabulous and this novel is a moment of literary lightning captured for all time.

Describing the Manderley in her dreams she writes: "Nature had come into her own again and, little by, little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers....The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church."

In chapter two she begins: "We can never go back again, that much is certain.  The past is still too close to us.  The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and the sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had been before."

In describing the unnamed male companion stuck in this emotional turmoil (also from chapter two): "He will fall to smoking cigarette after cigarette, not bothering to extinguish them, and the glowing stubs will lie around on the ground like petals.  He will talk quickly and eagerly about nothing at all, snatching at any subject as a panacea to pain."

Woo! Somebody fan me.  I've got the vapors.

It's this combination of excellent language usage and insight into the human condition that makes a good book for me.  As we've said all along, a great novel speaks to these common, universal human experiences and sheds light on them.  It sets us in the direction of hope and we can glean wisdom along the way, even if it is only the comforting wisdom of, "You are not alone."

In the third chapter we are introduced to Mrs. Van Hopper, who is easily one of my favorite characters in fiction.  Not my favorite in the same way Bilbo Bagins, Jane Eyre, or Hamlet is.  She is more in line with a Falstaff, or Meriadoc Brandybuck.  Not essential for the whole novel, but a delight as they come on and enter the stage.

Mrs. Van Hopper is a bit of a one woman paparazzi.  She travels to Monte Carlo every year not to take in the sights and relax.  Rather, she goes to find and ingratiate herself to the rich and famous also on vacation there.

"It seemed as though notables must be fed to her, much as invalids are spooned their jelly; and though titles were preferred by her, any face seen in a social paper served as well.  Names scattered in a gossip column, authors, artists, actors and their kind, even the mediocre ones, as long as she had learnt of them in print."

The unnamed protagonist is introduced as a sort of hired companion for Mrs. Van Hopper.  She was hired for ninety pounds, payable at the end of the season.  She is often draw into the games Mrs. Van Hopper plays with the famous.  Essentially the old woman runs a scam where she declares that she saw the individual at the wedding of her nephew, produces a picture of the happy couple on their honeymoon, and trusts the fact that famous people attend a ridiculous number of weddings they can't remember and depends on their good manners to treat her like an acquaintance they simply forgot.  This nets her no end of favors and invitations to parties and lavish estates.

"There was nothing for it but to sit in my usual place beside Mrs. Van Hopper while she, like a large, complacent spider, spun her wide net of tedium about the stranger's person."

Seriously..."wide net of tedium".  My goodness, I'm in love heart palpitations and all.

The following chapters contain the whirlwind romance with the much older and previously married Maxim, aided by Mrs Van Hopper catching a nasty case of influenza, and lends some foreshadowing of future difficulties and a secret buried or, more appropriately, drowned.  In the end the two get unexpectedly married, have a honeymoon in Italy, and return to Maxim's home of Manderley.

The introduction to Manderley chapters are quite beautifully written and you get a genuine sense of awkwardness as the protagonist begins her life in someone else's place, and with someone else's things.  How strange and otherworldly would it be to sit in a chair beside your husband knowing that its cushion had already had years forming to someone else, that the dog cuddled up to you did so because of a habit formed with someone else, that your bed, desk, bathroom items and all were previously used by another who came before you.  She struggles with this throughout.  Then she begins to meet people who all judge her against Rebecca, commenting on how different she is from her, wondering if she will uphold the traditions of parties and balls, etc.  Everywhere Rebecca is praised and our unnamed heroine begins a slide down into a mental breakdown as she begins to compare herself to Rebecca in her own soul.

I actually look forward to this book with delight every time I sit down to read it.  While I know what happens in the end (because I'm like Harry from "When Harry Met Sally") I look forward to the end.  It's not a happy ending, but it is certainly in keeping with the tone of the book.

Fun Fact:  Daphne Du Maurier was also the author of "Birds" which Alfred Hitchcock based his film "The Birds" on.

Pax,

W