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En ung antikvarboghandler bliver bedt om at skrive den reserverede forfatter Vida Winters biografi. Den fortælling, der oprulles af den døende forfatter, handler om en mærkelig familie i et stort hus med en mystisk baby og en brand.
BookshelfMonstrosity: These novels offer gothic suspense's classic creepy atmosphere, though with somewhat different story-lines. Fingersmith takes place in Victorian England while The Thirteenth Tale is contemporary, but both emphasize books, mysteries about birth and identity, insanity, and grand houses.… (mere)
"Reading can be dangerous." Thus [a:Diane Setterfield|22665|Diane Setterfield|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1255913779p2/22665.jpg] writes on page four of [b:The Thirteenth Tale|19673922|The Thirteenth Tale|Diane Setterfield|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387723998s/19673922.jpg|849453]. Too right. So dangerous, in fact, that the reader may lose all track of time and forget to get off at the right train station, or empty the washing machine, or feed the cats, or go to sleep.
One dark, rainy November evening in Cambridge, Margaret Lea comes home to find a letter waiting for her. Margaret leads a solitary life writing the odd historical literary biography and working with her father in his antiquarian bookshop. She doesn't read contemporary fiction, so she is perplexed as to why Vida Winters, Britain's most celebrated living author, is writing to her of all people.
What follows is nothing short of magical. Setterfield weaves stories within stories as we learn more about Margaret and the mysterious author, and the history of ruined Angelfield House. Angelfield, with its gardens, ghosts and vast library. Violent Charlie, his intriguing sister Isabelle, and the strange emerald-eyed twins with their long coppery hair. What happened to this family? How was their ancestral home destroyed? And what does it all have to do with Vida Winters?
This is a book for those of you who love stories, for whom people in books are as real in your minds as your family. It grabs hold of you and doesn't let you go, and its characters voices will stay with you. ( )
This one of my favorite books. I don't re-read books very often. This is one of the few that would make the list. This book has been reviewed about 3000 times, so I'm not going to add more to the pile. I will just stay I recommend this book to all book lovers no matter what genre you prefer. A+ ( )
A family saga with Gothic overtones, dark secrets, lost twins, a tragic fire, a missing manuscript and over-obvious nods to Jane Eyre, Rebecca and The Woman in White, it reads like something a creative writing class might write as a committee, for the sole purpose of coming up with a novel that would suit a book group (and tellingly, there are "Reading Group Study Notes" at the back suggesting topics for discussion).
The Thirteenth Tale is not without fault. The gentle giant Aurelius is a stock character, and the ending is perhaps a little too concerned with tying up all loose ends. But it is a remarkable first novel, a book about the joy of books, a riveting multi-layered mystery that twists and turns, and weaves a quite magical spell for most of its length.
"The Thirteenth Tale" keeps us reading for its nimble cadences and atmospheric locales, as well as for its puzzles, the pieces of which, for the most part, fall into place just as we discover where the holes are. And yet, for all its successes -- and perhaps because of them -- on the whole the book feels unadventurous, content to rehash literary formulas rather than reimagine them.
A book that you wake in the middle of the night craving to get back to...Timeless, charming, a pure pleasure to read...The Thirteenth Tale is a book to savor a dozen times.
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story. -Vida Winter, Tales of Change and Desperation
Tilegnelse
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
In memory
Ivy Dora and Fred Harold Morris
Corina Ethel and Ambrose Charles Setterfield
Første ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
It was November.
Citater
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes-characters even-caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. - Vida Winter
Tell me the truth.
Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eye over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so.
… ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection …
So they became friends, the way old married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky on the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself.
. . . she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears . . . . It was the sound of joy. He married her for it.
. . . But in her disease was a distillation: The more it reduced her, the more it exposed her essence. Every time I saw her she seemed diminished: thinner, frailer, more transparent, and the weaker she grew, the more the steel at her center was revealed.
. . . when I read about kindly grandmothers in my books, I supply them with her face.
“I know.” He didn’t know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,” he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their language, 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 humor, 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.
Sidste ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
He opened a cool green eye, regarded me for a moment, then closed it again.
En ung antikvarboghandler bliver bedt om at skrive den reserverede forfatter Vida Winters biografi. Den fortælling, der oprulles af den døende forfatter, handler om en mærkelig familie i et stort hus med en mystisk baby og en brand.
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The Thirteenth Tale: Middles (SPOILERS)
7
One dark, rainy November evening in Cambridge, Margaret Lea comes home to find a letter waiting for her. Margaret leads a solitary life writing the odd historical literary biography and working with her father in his antiquarian bookshop. She doesn't read contemporary fiction, so she is perplexed as to why Vida Winters, Britain's most celebrated living author, is writing to her of all people.
What follows is nothing short of magical. Setterfield weaves stories within stories as we learn more about Margaret and the mysterious author, and the history of ruined Angelfield House. Angelfield, with its gardens, ghosts and vast library. Violent Charlie, his intriguing sister Isabelle, and the strange emerald-eyed twins with their long coppery hair. What happened to this family? How was their ancestral home destroyed? And what does it all have to do with Vida Winters?
This is a book for those of you who love stories, for whom people in books are as real in your minds as your family. It grabs hold of you and doesn't let you go, and its characters voices will stay with you. (