Setterfield’s debut is enchanting Goth for the 21st century.
A dying writer bids a young bookshop assistant to write her biography.
Margaret Lea grew up in a household of mourning, but she never knew why until the day she opened a box of papers underneath her parent’s bed and found the birth and death certificates of a twin sister of whom she never knew. It is the coincidence of twins in the life of Vida Winter, Britain’s most famous writer, that convinces Margaret to leave her post at her father’s rare-books store and travel to the dying writer’s Yorkshire estate. There, she hears a story no one else knows: who Vida Winter really is. For decades, the author has wildly fabricated answers to personal questions in interviews. Now Vida wants to tell the true story. And what a story it is, replete with madness; incest; a pair of twins who speak a private language; a devastating fire; a ghost that opens doors and closes books; a baby abandoned on a doorstep in the rain; a page torn from a turn-of-the-century edition of Jane Eyre; a cake-baking gentle giant; skeletons; topiaries; blind housekeepers; and suicide. As the master storyteller nears death, Margaret has yet to understand why she is the one Vida chose to record her tale. And is it a tall tale? One last great fiction to leave for her reading public? Only Margaret, who begins to catch glimpses of her own dead twin in the eternal gloom of the Winter estate, can sort truth from longing and lies from guilt. Setterfield has crafted an homage to the romantic heroines of du Maurier, Collins and the Brontës. But this is no postmodern revision of the genre. It is a contemporary gothic tale whose excesses and occasional implausibility (Vida’s “brother” is the least convincing character) can be forgiven for the thrill of the storytelling.
Setterfield’s debut is enchanting Goth for the 21st century.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-9802-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Molinaro, replacing her mildly experimental style of previous fictions (The New Moon with the Old Moon in Her Arms, 1993, etc.) with mostly straight-ahead narrative, effectively retells the Oedipus myth from the viewpoint of his mother/wife, who knows the terrible secret but chooses to marry her son anyway. In a series of short chapters, which stay mostly with Jocasta's perspective (but which also range from Oedipus and the couple's daughter, Antigone, to the man/woman prophet Tiresias), Molinaro limns a thesis she first puts forth in an author's note: ``The myth of Oedipus...retells the ritualistic slaying of the old king, and the queen's remarriage.... Queen Jocasta's suicide is a protest against Oedipus claiming the throne in patrilinear succession.'' Fortunately, Molinaro doesn't let such pedantry get in the way of a good story. Jocasta, who is ``Hera's highpriestess, after all,'' becomes pregnant with Oedipus on a night when ``female power will be at its apex,'' loses her son in a country where ``bribery is booming,'' and lives through the death of her husband, Laius, and subsequent remarriage to her son by deciding to ``discipline my mind not to think anything I don't want him to know.'' Molinaro plays around with ideas and subplots as Oedipus writes home to his ostensible parents, enjoys masochistic sex with Jocasta, has children, and puts Tiresias on the trail of the oracular mystery, foreshadowing the fateful moment. When it arrives, Jocasta throws herself to her death, offering ``a long-due sacrifice.'' In a playful epilogue, Antigone, among others, helps to finish the story, which her dead mother and blind father can no longer tell: ``Father was so worried that holding my hand might be misinterpreted we finally acquired a staff, and both held onto it.'' It's the flip side of the Oedipus Complex, what Freud might have made of the Greek tragedy had he been a woman and a novelist. Molinaro's most accessible work.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-929701-44-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Over the epistolary protests of his wife in Copenhagen, Bertie, the Prince of Wales (Bertie and the Seven Bodies, 1990, etc.), is up to his stiff upper lip in murder again. This time he's in Paris in the spring of 1891 when he learns that Maurice Letissier, the fiancÇ of his old friend Jules d'Agincourt's blooming daughter Rosine, has been fatally shot during an unusually distracting solo number at the Moulin Rouge. Despite the presence of 500 potential suspects, the circle is swiftly narrowed with the discovery of the murder weapon, emblazoned with the d'Agincourt crest and evidently removed from the family's gun room by either Jules, his domineering wife, Juliette, his teenage son Tristan, or Rosine herself. There'll be some piquant twists—Rosine's frank confession that she was willing to marry her family's chosen suitor so that she could give him a son and commence a proper affair with her own lover, painter Glyn Morgan; a most revealing odyssey through the bridegroom's earlier lovers; a climactic showdown in a Turkish bath—and obligatory supporting roles by Moulin Rouge specialist La Goulue, lowlife painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Bertie's sidekick, actress Sarah Bernhardt. This time, though, the story's charm is a little forced and routine. Foolish, lighthearted Bertie's distinctive edges have worn so smooth by now that he seems no more quaint than any other historical detective, and hardly more than any detective at all.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-89296-550-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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