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When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales.
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.… (més)
Margaret Lea, escriptora de biografies i lectora compusliva, rep l'encàrrec de redactar la biografia de l'escriptora Vida Winter (amb la que comparteix l'amor per la literatura. De fet l'obra està plena de referències a clàssics de la literatura universal, especialment a Jane Eyre). En primer terme desconfia de les intencions d'ella ja que anteriorment ha contat nombroses històries falses sobra la seva vida.
Un cop accepta la feina, es trasllada a la casa de Vida Winter i comença a redactar la història de la seva vid. La història parla sobre dues bessones, de caràcters antagònics però cruels en si mateixes, de la seva trastornada mare, de l'oncle que manté una relació "especial" amb la seva mare (encara més transtornat que l'anterior), dels padrins i de la història de la casa on habitaven en general.
La història potser no és trepidant però tampoc li fa falta. Des del començament t'enganxa gràcies a una excel·lent caracterització dels personatges, profunds -una mica massa enrevessats algun cop- per ells mateixos. L'únic emperò que podria trobar-li és que l'obra està plena de casualitats i nexes entre els personatges.
Un llibre més que recomanable i que vaig conèixer gràcies al club de lectura ( )
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.
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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
Dedicatòria
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In memory
Ivy Dora and Fred Harold Morris
Corina Ethel and Ambrose Charles Setterfield
Primeres paraules
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It was November.
Citacions
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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.
Darreres paraules
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He opened a cool green eye, regarded me for a moment, then closed it again.
When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales.
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The Thirteenth Tale: Middles (SPOILERS)
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"genial!"