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Instead of bananas or tacos, I have no doubt Henry James would have been the sort of man who chose instead to have commas on his boxer shorts. I always thought of Henry James as unnecessarily long winded and so always avoided his books, and though I wasn't wrong, his books, not all of them at least, aren't the unreadable tomes I always considred them to be. I suspect that may only be able to handle him in short form, however. As to the actual story, I was hooked. It reminded me of a recent movie...
2.5 stars rounded up. A young governess is hired to care for the young niece and nephew of an unmarried man who acts as guardian of the two following the death of their parents. One condition must be upheld, however – the governess is not for any reason or by any means to contact her new employer. This seemed to me a daunting task and one which I am not certain would appeal to me in the least. The young governess, however, is charmed by the gentleman and agrees to his request. Her story, detaile...
“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!” Screen shot from the 1961 version of The Innocents based on the James short story.A governess is hired to look after the nephew and niece of a man who has inherited the responsibility for the children after the death of their parents. He is very explicit in his instructions to the governess that he is not to be bothered wit...
“I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?” A young governess accepts a position in a beautiful estate in the English countryside, in Essex. The cosmopolitan uncle entrusts his niece and nephew into her hands and asks not to be disturbed under any circumstance
A strange tale about a repressed young governess who, fearing her employer’s estate is haunted by malevolent spirits, sets out to protect her pair of pupils from harm at any cost. Told from the governess’s increasingly erratic perspective, the plot revolves around her loss of contact with reality, charting her slow descent into paranoia and despair. The pacing’s jerky and the characterization’s paper thin, but the work’s full of perplexing mysteries and heavy-handed queer subtext that’s interest...
Redonkulous! Where's my SPOOKY?! I mean, I thought I'd get a few good jump scares out of a book with possessed children in it. You know what didn't happen, not even once, while I was listening to this book?THIS:I'm not sure why my teenage self thought The Turn of the Screw was worth 4 stars, but my older-than-teenage self certainly doesn't.On the surface, it seems like this should be a winner for me in the classic department - short, scary...short. But it was kinda crap. So the gist is that t
I hate when I don't love a classic. It makes me feel stupid, like I'm too ignorant to comprehend literary brilliance. I'm particularly disappointed in myself for not loving The Turn of the Screw, because I'm such a huge fan of all things ghastly and Gothic. And this is both!But it's true. I didn't care for it. The governess appears seemingly out of thin air, lacks personality or any believable motivation. Her obsession with the children is either utter nonsense or perversely sexual. Neither opti...
Turn of the Screw is a pretty cool story. It's about a governess who either heroically attempts to protect her two charges from malevolent ghosts or goes dangerously bonkers. James leaves it ambiguous and I love that kind of story. Ambiguity works for me. Four stars for the plot. Kindof an abrupt ending though.On the other hand there's his writing style. I was at this party once and the topic was what would you do if the world was ending and the answer was generally that we would have all the se...
There is a presumption that a book, if written concurrent with a certain time period during which a ruler of notable longevity reigned and originating from an area of the world long known, during that time period in particular, for an effusiveness of style in excess of that which may be, at a minimum, absolutely required to convey a particular message or idea, may, on occasion, if not predominantly and generally, tend toward a style that, when compared and contrasted with styles of later writers...
It is the worst thing in the world to leave children with servants. Maria Edgeworth , Practical Education, 1798Of all the vulgar superstitions of the half educated, none dies harder than the absurd delusion that there is no such thing as ghosts. William T Stead, Real Ghost Stories, 1897The T of the S is a very mechanical matter, I honestly think – an inferior, a merely pictorial, subject and rather a shameless pot-boiler. Henry James in a letter, 1898Come, let us enter what Wayne Booth called “t...
