Narrated by 18-year-old Merricat Blackwood, the story unfolds of her life in the Blackwood family home with her older sister Constance and their Uncle Julian, confined to a wheelchair. Jackson is a masterful writer and her prose is cutting, with pitch-perfect dialogue, unforgettable characters and a plot that is simple and yet full of layered complexity. This book – a novella really – is a gothic suspense: sharp, precise, clever, witty, funny, moving, frightening, tense and dark. This was her last book tragically she died in 1965 aged only 48. Jackson's novel emerges less as a study in eccentricity and more-like some of her other fictions-as a powerful critique of the anxious, ruthless processes involved in the maintenance of normalcy itself.My review of another classic that I have only just got around to reading: WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE (Penguin Classics 2009 first published in 1962) by Shirley Jackson, an author renowned for her darkly funny and shocking writing. Unable to drive him away by either polite or occult means, Merricat adopts more desperate methods, resulting in crisis, tragedy, and the revelation of a terrible secret.
But one day a stranger arrives-cousin Charles, with his eye on the Blackwood fortune-and manages to penetrate into their carefully shielded lives. Merricat has developed an idiosyncratic system of rules and protective magic to guard the estate against intrusions from hostile villagers. Six years after four family members died suspiciously of arsenic poisoning, the three remaining Blackwoods-elder, agoraphobic sister Constance wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian and eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine, or, Merricat-live together in pleasant isolation. Shirley Jackson's deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family takes readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, macabre humor, and gothic atmosphere.
0 kommentar(er)
