The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent; Ask and It Is Given, Esther and Jerry Hicks

Goddess Selket, Pharaoh Tutankhamun, Egyptian Museum, Egypt, 1323 BCE

(August 31, February 20) This is another version of The Secret and The Science of Getting Rich; this one is a lot more sure about the way things are, especially death.

I really like Abraham's voice, actually -- "they" are very no-nonsense, balls-to-the-wall about everything.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Polixeni Papapetrou, Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs, 2003

(August 25) I am so surprised to be saying that this is a great book and that I enjoyed it. I never wanted to read about pedophilia and believed I'd never read this novel, but Lolita is always included on "best" book lists, including recently a "30 books to read before 30" -- which is really cutting it fine, right? -- so I gave in.

And so it is a great book -- an amazing book, all the more amazing because it makes an unsavory subject completely enjoyable. As Stephen Metcalf says, "with Lolita, you must work past its beauty to recognize how shocking it is", and it is sometimes very hard work to get past the beauty.

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

Bsidez, Photo of the Chateau de Miranda

(August 3) This is Waters’ fifth and most recent book; ::sigh:: now I will have to wait two and half years for the next one.

Like Night Watch, this is set in post-Second World War England; like Affinity, there is a supernatural element; like the first three (Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith) it is a first-person narrative.

But unlike them all, the narrator is a heterosexual man... and there is no lesbianism in it at all... unless you count the very slight hint that Caroline might be lesbian. (This is never resolved, nor in some ways even relevant.)

AND.

There’s no plot twist! Unless the lack of a plot twist is the twist!

For, knowing Waters, I paid careful attention all through the book to any doubts or suspicions hanging vaguely around a character’s words or motives, and yet none of the “planted” clues -- the narrator’s early destructive act in the house and his latter despair and recklessness over his broken engagement, Seeley’s pompousness, Caroline’s hardness, Mrs. Ayres’ snobbishness, Roderick’s shell-shock, Betty’s acting skills... and dozens of other little sinister moments -- none of them congealed into a villain responsible for a number of deaths.

The house was tagged as the villain from the start, and that is how it is left. In fact, it is a little alarming at the end that the narrator is still hanging about the house, although Waters doesn’t make him seem insane.

Nonetheless, I expected till the very last page that there would be a rational explanation, since Affinity created the same air of the possibility of supernatural events and then quite dashed it in the end.

Here it was not dashed; this time there is no real explanation. And, really, it’s the house that dominates the story like a lead character. The house has amazing presence for an inanimate object.

Atmosphere is everything in this story, and is actually very rewarding despite the absence of a neat tying-up of loose ends. It’s spooky and suspenseful... haunting... the more so because of those loose ends, really.