strange and random happenstance

Death in the Floating City by Tasha Alexander
Published by: Minotaur
Publication Date: October 16th, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

As a child there is always that one person whom you are thrust into a relationship with because of your parents. The greatest joy of growing up is that there comes a time when you no longer have to associate with them and can relegate them to your past. Which is exactly what Emily did with Emma Callum. Emma ran off with an Italian Duke and Emily never thought of her again. Until Emma reached out for help. She had heard of Emily's success in solving crimes and is in desperate need of her assistance. Stranded in Venice Emma doesn't even speak Italian and her father-in-law Conte Barozzi has gone and gotten himself murdered and her husband Paolo is missing. If there was ever a time for Emily's help it is now. But even murder can't fully change someone and as Emma flirts with Emily's husband Colin instead of answering their questions Emily wonders if it was wise to help her old nemesis. Though Emily and her husband are professionals and they will do the job asked of them despite the hindrance of Emma. Their first clue is a ring that was found on the Conte's body and a historian is needed.

Luckily when they arrived in Venice a note was waiting at their hotel from a local scholar turned bookseller inquiring after the ring. Emily is hoping Signore Caravello can help answer a few questions as to the ring's provenance. With his magnifying glass he finds two initials next to the maker's mark, BB and NV. Because the ring was found in the possession of a Barozzi, it's assumed that this belonged to some relative. Emily, now with the help of Singnore Caravello's daughter Donata, searches for this relative and finds Besina, who lived in the 15th century. Yet their one hope of confirming her as the ring's owner is dashed when the painting that just might have shown her wearing it is vandalized. What's more the Barozzis sworn enemies, the Vendelinos, swear that the ring is theirs and has been missing for centuries. Soon Emily and Colin are juggling not just a murder, but valuable missing books, a possibly forgotten legacy, a medium whose reputation was destroyed, the Conte's probable mistress and her jealous husband, and most disturbing of all, a person dressed as a plague doctor following Emily through the canals of Venice. Yet the crucial question is, can they solve the crime in the present by finding out what happen to Besina all those years ago?

There is a plethora of books set in Venice, and the truth is the setting doesn't make the book but a well written book can make the setting, forever linking the two in your mind. Death in the Floating City perfectly fits into the pantheon of books set in Venice that were instant classics for me, from Daphne Du Maurier's Don't Look Now to Mary Robinette Kowal's Valour and Vanity to Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. These are all books that show Venice as imperfect yet lead you to fall in love with the city despite it's issues. I'm not talking about the fact that it's sinking into the seas, but the Italian way of life as it was back in the day. As I think of it in my mind as women's rights, marriages, and whores oh my. Courtesans, mistresses, and illegitimate children were all par for the course in Venice. What's so fascinating though is the way Tasha writes so that there's our modern POV then there's Emily's POV, which is Victorian but constantly working to break the shackles and think more modern, and then the Venetian POV which is far more fluid and modern, but that fluidity and the resultant issues drives the plot forward. It's literally a culture clash at it's most dramatic and I couldn't put it down.

What really drove the narrative in this installment was that the secondary story instead of being journals or letters that are concurrent with our story was instead the story of Besina and her ill fated love to Nicolo Vendelino way back in 1489. At first I was prejudiced against this story because being set in Italy and the couple in question being from warring houses I was sure this would be Tasha's take on Romeo and Juliet and personally, that isn't a favorite play of mine. Yes, it's a classic, I mean, it's Shakespeare after all, but not all Shakespeare floats my boat. Oh how wrong I was to compare it to that play of the Bard's. This secondary storyline soon became my favorite part of Death in the Floating City and I had to restrain myself from jumping ahead to see how it played out. The best way I can describe the story of Besina and Nicolo is that it's like Sarah Dunant decided to write her version of Drake Carne and Morwenna Chynoweth's star-crossed romance from Poldark. Much as with the two young lovers on Poldark, my heart was continually breaking, hoping for Besina to break free and be with Nicolo. Their story is tragic and heartbreaking and achingly perfect. Because, if I'm being honest, much like how Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, sometimes perfection isn't a happily ever after.

Even though my attachment to Besina and Nicolo is the reason I lost my heart to this book I can not discount all the other awesomeness contained within the pages of Death in the Floating City. The menacing plague doctor like the "child" in the raincoat in Don't Look Now is haunting, but that's just the tip of the iceberg! There's Caterina Brexiano, the maligned medium! There's Brother Giovanni with his knowledge of books and his hunt for the truth. As for the books? Oh dear me, I swoon at the valuable books and illuminated manuscripts contained within these pages. But the vapors don't stop there. The gorgeous illuminated manuscripts contain secrets not just in their detailed artwork but on the very pages they were written. Secrets hidden in art? This is Lady Emily's version of The Da Vinci Code, but next level, because instead of being bogged down with religiosity we are on the hunt for the story of Besina and Nicolo! A love lost to history recovered! This book didn't just make me want to go to Venice, it made me want to delve back into my art history studies. Oh, I do love a good illuminated manuscript. If only they all held such secrets as the ones Tasha has dreamed up!

It should be a truth universally acknowledged that we all have in our past some frenemy. Imagine the theme song to Veronica Mars playing here... While Emily never considered Emma her friend, she was in one of those situations where friendship was forced on her and it turned sour, or shattered like her doll's face when Emma destroyed it. Whether it's similar to Emily's case or just a friend from childhood that proved themselves a complete and utter two-faced bitch, there's someone in everyone's past whom we'd rather avoid but some lingering sentimentality, AKA the sign that you are the better person, makes you willing to help if they reach out a hand. That is the situation Emily faces. While there is that deep temptation to just laugh from afar, something that social media makes so easy in this day and age, there's the other, more juicy feeling that you can prove to them that you are the better person. You hope that your help will finally awaken some kind of gratitude in them, but as is often the case, as Emily sees, they are just the same person but older. You can see them more clearly for who they are and you pity instead of hate them. But still, reaching out that hand and being the better person? Priceless.

Now here's a question I have for the floor. Hopefully you have been encouraged by Alexander Autumn to pick up one or all of Tasha's wonderful Lady Emily series and I want your expert opinion. Is this the first time that Emily's writing is shown to be definitely written from a future date for an audience? Because Emily has a throw away line about how her identification of NV would prove to be entirely inaccurate, proving this was written at a later date. Also at the same time she says "as you will see" where the you is us, meaning, definite knowledge of an audience. Now I don't have any problem with this, seeing as an author that Tasha greatly admires, Elizabeth Peters, used such devices in her Amelia Peabody series which is another series I love. In fact, there's a part of me, a part that will reference but will not spoil the ending of this book, that noticed a certain resolution that mirrors an event that takes place at the end of the sixth installment in that series, The Last Camel Died at Noon, that makes me think, Tasha did this on purpose. If she did this for that very reason, that's cunning. But also if you think about it, this is the first case that Emily and Colin take that doesn't literally land on their doorstep, so that could have been why there's a change as well... either way, I'll be waiting to see if this writing quirk happens again. Onwards to the next book!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alexander Autumn, Amelia Peabody, Death in the Floating City, Don't Look Now, Elizabeth Peters, Poldark, Romeo and Juliet, Tasha Alexander, The Da Vinci Code, Venice, Veronica Mars

Death in the Floating City by Tasha Alexander
Published by: Minotaur
Publication Date: October 16th, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

As a child there is always that one person whom you are thrust into a relationship with because of your parents. The greatest joy of growing up is that there comes a time when you no longer have to associate with them and can relegate them to your past. Which is exactly what Emily did with Emma Callum. Emma ran off with an Italian Duke and Emily never thought of her again. Until Emma reached out for help. She had heard of Emily's success in solving crimes and is in desperate need of her assistance. Stranded in Venice Emma doesn't even speak Italian and her father-in-law Conte Barozzi has gone and gotten himself murdered and her husband Paolo is missing. If there was ever a time for Emily's help it is now. But even murder can't fully change someone and as Emma flirts with Emily's husband Colin instead of answering their questions Emily wonders if it was wise to help her old nemesis. Though Emily and her husband are professionals and they will do the job asked of them despite the hindrance of Emma. Their first clue is a ring that was found on the Conte's body and a historian is needed.

Luckily when they arrived in Venice a note was waiting at their hotel from a local scholar turned bookseller inquiring after the ring. Emily is hoping Signore Caravello can help answer a few questions as to the ring's provenance. With his magnifying glass he finds two initials next to the maker's mark, BB and NV. Because the ring was found in the possession of a Barozzi, it's assumed that this belonged to some relative. Emily, now with the help of Singnore Caravello's daughter Donata, searches for this relative and finds Besina, who lived in the 15th century. Yet their one hope of confirming her as the ring's owner is dashed when the painting that just might have shown her wearing it is vandalized. What's more the Barozzis sworn enemies, the Vendelinos, swear that the ring is theirs and has been missing for centuries. Soon Emily and Colin are juggling not just a murder, but valuable missing books, a possibly forgotten legacy, a medium whose reputation was destroyed, the Conte's probable mistress and her jealous husband, and most disturbing of all, a person dressed as a plague doctor following Emily through the canals of Venice. Yet the crucial question is, can they solve the crime in the present by finding out what happen to Besina all those years ago?

There is a plethora of books set in Venice, and the truth is the setting doesn't make the book but a well written book can make the setting, forever linking the two in your mind. Death in the Floating City perfectly fits into the pantheon of books set in Venice that were instant classics for me, from Daphne Du Maurier's Don't Look Now to Mary Robinette Kowal's Valour and Vanity to Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. These are all books that show Venice as imperfect yet lead you to fall in love with the city despite it's issues. I'm not talking about the fact that it's sinking into the seas, but the Italian way of life as it was back in the day. As I think of it in my mind as women's rights, marriages, and whores oh my. Courtesans, mistresses, and illegitimate children were all par for the course in Venice. What's so fascinating though is the way Tasha writes so that there's our modern POV then there's Emily's POV, which is Victorian but constantly working to break the shackles and think more modern, and then the Venetian POV which is far more fluid and modern, but that fluidity and the resultant issues drives the plot forward. It's literally a culture clash at it's most dramatic and I couldn't put it down.

What really drove the narrative in this installment was that the secondary story instead of being journals or letters that are concurrent with our story was instead the story of Besina and her ill fated love to Nicolo Vendelino way back in 1489. At first I was prejudiced against this story because being set in Italy and the couple in question being from warring houses I was sure this would be Tasha's take on Romeo and Juliet and personally, that isn't a favorite play of mine. Yes, it's a classic, I mean, it's Shakespeare after all, but not all Shakespeare floats my boat. Oh how wrong I was to compare it to that play of the Bard's. This secondary storyline soon became my favorite part of Death in the Floating City and I had to restrain myself from jumping ahead to see how it played out. The best way I can describe the story of Besina and Nicolo is that it's like Sarah Dunant decided to write her version of Drake Carne and Morwenna Chynoweth's star-crossed romance from Poldark. Much as with the two young lovers on Poldark, my heart was continually breaking, hoping for Besina to break free and be with Nicolo. Their story is tragic and heartbreaking and achingly perfect. Because, if I'm being honest, much like how Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, sometimes perfection isn't a happily ever after.

Even though my attachment to Besina and Nicolo is the reason I lost my heart to this book I can not discount all the other awesomeness contained within the pages of Death in the Floating City. The menacing plague doctor like the "child" in the raincoat in Don't Look Now is haunting, but that's just the tip of the iceberg! There's Caterina Brexiano, the maligned medium! There's Brother Giovanni with his knowledge of books and his hunt for the truth. As for the books? Oh dear me, I swoon at the valuable books and illuminated manuscripts contained within these pages. But the vapors don't stop there. The gorgeous illuminated manuscripts contain secrets not just in their detailed artwork but on the very pages they were written. Secrets hidden in art? This is Lady Emily's version of The Da Vinci Code, but next level, because instead of being bogged down with religiosity we are on the hunt for the story of Besina and Nicolo! A love lost to history recovered! This book didn't just make me want to go to Venice, it made me want to delve back into my art history studies. Oh, I do love a good illuminated manuscript. If only they all held such secrets as the ones Tasha has dreamed up!

It should be a truth universally acknowledged that we all have in our past some frenemy. Imagine the theme song to Veronica Mars playing here... While Emily never considered Emma her friend, she was in one of those situations where friendship was forced on her and it turned sour, or shattered like her doll's face when Emma destroyed it. Whether it's similar to Emily's case or just a friend from childhood that proved themselves a complete and utter two-faced bitch, there's someone in everyone's past whom we'd rather avoid but some lingering sentimentality, AKA the sign that you are the better person, makes you willing to help if they reach out a hand. That is the situation Emily faces. While there is that deep temptation to just laugh from afar, something that social media makes so easy in this day and age, there's the other, more juicy feeling that you can prove to them that you are the better person. You hope that your help will finally awaken some kind of gratitude in them, but as is often the case, as Emily sees, they are just the same person but older. You can see them more clearly for who they are and you pity instead of hate them. But still, reaching out that hand and being the better person? Priceless.

Now here's a question I have for the floor. Hopefully you have been encouraged by Alexander Autumn to pick up one or all of Tasha's wonderful Lady Emily series and I want your expert opinion. Is this the first time that Emily's writing is shown to be definitely written from a future date for an audience? Because Emily has a throw away line about how her identification of NV would prove to be entirely inaccurate, proving this was written at a later date. Also at the same time she says "as you will see" where the you is us, meaning, definite knowledge of an audience. Now I don't have any problem with this, seeing as an author that Tasha greatly admires, Elizabeth Peters, used such devices in her Amelia Peabody series which is another series I love. In fact, there's a part of me, a part that will reference but will not spoil the ending of this book, that noticed a certain resolution that mirrors an event that takes place at the end of the sixth installment in that series, The Last Camel Died at Noon, that makes me think, Tasha did this on purpose. If she did this for that very reason, that's cunning. But also if you think about it, this is the first case that Emily and Colin take that doesn't literally land on their doorstep, so that could have been why there's a change as well... either way, I'll be waiting to see if this writing quirk happens again. Onwards to the next book!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alexander Autumn, Amelia Peabody, Death in the Floating City, Don't Look Now, Elizabeth Peters, Poldark, Romeo and Juliet, Tasha Alexander, The Da Vinci Code, Venice, Veronica Mars

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: NYRB Classics
Publication Date: October 28th, 2008
Format: Paperback, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

On December the 3rd life changed forever for Nat Hocken and his family. The day before was like any other, he worked at the farm and ate his lunch on the cliffs overlooking the channel. But the birds seemed agitated. That night, the wind came in from the East and turned fall into winter in Cornwall. While he slept soundly next to his wife he was awoken by a tapping on the glass. Upon opening the window a bird attacked him and flew off. This happened once more, though his wife insisted in her groggy state that it was a dream. But once the children were attacked in the room across the hall his wife became scared as well. Nat spent the night fighting the birds off to find fifty little corpses on the floor of his children's bedroom by morning. The day after the night attack they tried to resume life as normal. After walking his daughter Jill to the school bus stop he decided to stop in at the farm to see if this was a unique occurrence to his family. Up at the farm they had heard nothing, but on his way back to his family the home service announced that birds were massing all over the country. Nat went home and prepared his house for the coming attack which he could feel coming deep in his bones. They survived that second night, those at the farm weren't so lucky. But how long can his family survive with their supplies ever dwindling and the birds become ever more fierce and silent?

There are many ways to interpret "The Birds." You can read that the East wind is the tide of Communism, a threat that could arrive at any moment, which was what Du Maurier intended seeing as this was written at the height of the Cold War. I, like Patrick McGrath who selected the stories for this book, found "The Birds" post apocalyptic setting more compelling. Yes, the story IS more Russian scare than world destroying plague, but this 1952 story could be seen as a prototype for what was to come in literature and television. Walking Dead anyone? Yet this is a far more languid way to tell a story that is about "the end." It's peaceful and quiet. The Hocken family trying to withstand an unknown force on limited rations in a desolate landscape sounds just like the best in horror films, but this would be of far more artistic fare, where the lighting of Nat's cigarette signals giving in to the inevitable.

The scope of this story is what I find most compelling. Knowing that this was the impetus for an Alfred Hitchcock classic I had assumptions as to what this story would be. Assumptions that I should have second guessed knowing Du Maurier's dislike of the adaptation. This shows horror on a very intimate and knowable scale with a single family facing off against the mundane omnipresent birds. Could we die because of something we took for granted as being peaceful turning against us? Could the known become unknown? You can see why this story still appeals to readers today, fear of the unknown, and attack by the previously known will always be a real threat, be it the reanimated corpses of loved ones as zombies or birds. Yet here it boils down to the fatalism in that last ambiguously bleak cigarette.

If you've only read Daphne Du Maurier's novels you truly haven't experienced her range as an author. Yes, her novels are some of the best and most beautifully written and suspenseful books you'll ever read from Rebecca to Jamaica Inn to The Scapegoat, but they often cover the same ground and don't even touch on the supernatural and strange that her short stories, such as "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" delve into. It's like Du Maurier felt a freedom in this shorter format that let her handle the outre, the other, and the persecuted that will surprise you in their range and occasional depravity. Each story is easily worthy of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone with a supernatural agency at work in the everyday lives of our heroes and heroines that is never quite fully explained. In "Blue Lenses" Mrs. Marda West has ocular surgery with special lenses inserted to regain her sight only to open her eyes and see that everyone has an animal's head. At first she thinks it's a joke being perpetrated on her but soon comes to realize that these visions are giving her insight into the true nature of people. People whom she trusted are animals of dubious nature and ill repute.

"The Blue Lenses," besides showing this "otherness," showcases an ongoing theme in these shorter works. Du Maurier's protagonists often think that they are the object of a joke being played at their expense. They are the victim of a con and the proper authorities are often viewed as conspiring against them. From "Split Second" to "La Sainte-Vierge" to "Don't Look Now" to the aforementioned "Blue Lenses" delusion and trickery are what everything hinges on. But this paranoia that has these people confused by what they see, hoping they are mistaken, actually shines a light on Du Maurier's true interest, plumbing the depths of humanity. The fact that these characters are so willing to believe that someone would go to the trouble of conning them shows a fear of the "other," a fear of what people are capable of. Because looking deeper, past the supernatural trappings, at the root these stories show that people are capable of murder.

In fact sometimes Du Maurier forgoes the supernatural entirely and tells a tale that is, in the end, just about murder. In fact my favorite story, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," is about a troubled girl who kills RAF men she meets. Of course it wouldn't be a true Du Maurier story if you weren't bamboozled into thinking it was a love story until the very last page, but again and again that is why these stories work, she is continually subverting your expectations. Yes you could boil this all down to man versus nature, be it's man's inner nature or actual nature or something against nature, but trying to condense it down does an injustice to the writing. Du Maurier through stories about killer birds, "The Birds," and killer usherettes, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," and women joining mountain cults that may be leper colonies, "Monte Verità," touches on so many truths and so many weighty topics that you can see why she was always miffed that people called her a "romance" author. She is so much more. If you don't believe, just pick up this book. I think it will change your mind.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Cold War, Communist, Daphne Du Maurier, Don't Look Now, Du Maurier December Deux, Hitchcock, Jamaica Inn, Kiss Me Again Stranger, Post-Apocalyptic, Rebecca, Rod Serling, The Birds, The Scapegoat, The Twilight Zone

Don't Look Now
Based on the short story by Daphne Du Maurier
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Sharon Williams, Nicholas Salter, Leopoldo Trieste, Massimo Serato, Renato Scarpa, Bruno Cattaneo, David Tree, Ann Rye, and Adelina Poerio
Release Date: October 16th, 1973
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

John and Laura Baxter are trying to pick up the pieces of their life after their young daughter Christine's death by accidental drowning in their backyard. Now in Venice John is working to restore a church while his wife is mired in her grief. Taking off time from work John takes Laura out to lunch where she helps two elderly sisters in the bathroom of the restaurant. One of the sisters is blind and claims to not only be psychic but to see Christine. This revelation has a profound effect on Laura. She collapses at the restaurant but later, back at their hotel, John and her passionately reconnect. Laura makes plans to meet the sisters again and try to contact Christine in a seance. Christine has one message, her father must leave Venice. He is in danger. The threat is unclear and John thinks it's a trick the sisters are playing on him and his wife and is angry. What does he have to fear in Venice?

Maybe the threat isn't in Venice? There's a late night phone call from their son's boarding school saying he has been in an accident. Laura rushes to England but when she is supposed to be homeward bound John sees her with the sisters making a stately procession down one of the canals. Convinced that the sisters tricked his wife into staying behind when their son needs her he frantically searches Venice for the three of them, actually going to the police in the end. But the police have their hands full with a recent spate of murders. In fact they find John's story so unlikely that they think he might just be involved in the murders somehow. When John finally finds Laura she is in England. But how? And more importantly, all this is detracting from the warning. John is still in Venice... is this wise?

Don't Look Now is the only adaptation of her work that Daphne Du Maurier ever blessed with her seal of approval. Frankly it's quite easy to see why she liked this most of all the various adaptations of her work. Don't Look Now remains true to the spirit of her short story. Instead of drastically changing locals or time frames or having Mrs. Danvers self immolate Nicholas Roeg took what Du Maurier had written and used it as a framework and built on it. Everything that happens seems like a natural progression of the short story from the page to the screen. What's more, many of the faults of the story, smug narration, a lack of foreshadowing, are eliminated by the simple expedient of the visual medium of film being able to show us instead of tell us. What I felt worked best was that Roeg carried various thematic imagery through the film but tied it back more firmly to the loss of Christine.

In Du Maurier's short story Christine's death is the driving force of the story but at the same time an afterthought. Her death from meningitis distances the reader. It's rare this could happen to them. But by having Christine drown in an accident it's more relatable. This could happen to anyone. Plus Venice being a city on water the threat of drowning is constantly present. With water and mirrors there is this reflective quality used throughout the film not just being a constant reminder of Christine's death but how it reflects back on her parents and on us. In fact I was reminded again and again of the Michael Caine classic, Dressed to Kill. Don't Look Now has that same feeling of relevancy and horror despite being made over forty years ago.

Seeing Christine's more relatable death isn't the only way Roeg makes the trauma more real. In Du Maurier's story John and Laura are in Venice on holiday, which, to an extent, makes them feel a little uncaring to the reader. Let's just forget about our dead daughter and our grieving son at boarding school and take a little trip shall we? Yeah, not the most sympathetic of characters. In the film John is in Venice for work. By them being in Venice for work and not play makes their suffering more alive. They aren't just trying to brush it under the carpet, they aren't just trying to make do and mend, they are still trapped in the sorrow but are attempting to keep moving forward. John is burying himself in work so that he won't constantly be in pain.

Their pain is a constant presence throughout the film and this connects you to John and Laura. Anyone with an once of empathy has to feel something for them. The scene that really struck me as getting to the heart of their relationship and therefore their story was a rather graphic sex scene, bizarre armpit licking and all. The reason this scene works is it shows two humans groping toward each other, trying to connect; yet at the same time it shows the distance that has grown up between them. They are physically together but mentally apart. This scene, which is a little uncomfortable to watch, is heartbreaking. To be together and apart simultaneously, it shows us, without anything but action, what grief and despair really are.

Roeg is also able to show the seedy side of Venice. This isn't a holiday for John and his wife, they are there off season. Venice is cold and wet and full of pigeons. In the story it's almost tourist perfect, with the murders shoved as far in the background as possible until that salient plot point can't be avoided. Hence when "the end" comes you missed all the clues because Du Maurier used them so sparingly, perhaps wanting that shock to the system at the very end. Roeg uses the murders ubiquitously, but in the background. Always there, always waiting, adding a level of danger, suffusing it throughout the film but never drawing too much attention to it. I loved how one of the sisters described Venice as being "a city in aspic inhabited by the dead." There's poetry and morbidity and danger all in that one phrase. Here there are alleys and shadows and mystery. Running and rushing and the feeling of danger. We aren't just stuck in John's head, we are running along beside him.

Yet the pay dirt of the film is the inclusion of the church. This is introduced by the simple expedient of John being a church restorer. Though why it's brilliant is because it gives the story balance. We have the supernatural ever present with the sisters and their premonitions. The supernatural was built in from the get go. Yet skepticism doesn't quite balance belief in the supernatural. Skepticism can't destroy evil, only good can, and that would be embodied by the church. This addition also helps to place the film strongly amongst it's peers. Good versus evil and the church were part of the zeitgeist of the early seventies. Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, the classics of the occult horror genre all had this dichotomy. To include it in Don't Look Now? Where it logically fit? It would have been stupid not to and Roeg was cunning in his adaptation. He knew just what to add and just how to do it. No wonder Du Maurier gave it two thumbs up.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Daphne Du Maurier, Don't Look Now, Donald Sutherland, Drowning, Du Maurier December Deux, Grief, Murder, Nicholas Roeg, Psychic, Rosemary's Baby, Seances, Sex, The Exorcist, The Omen, Venice, Warning

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: NYRB Classics
Publication Date: October 28th, 2008
Format: Paperback, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

John and Laura have gone to Venice in the hopes of putting the past behind them by revisiting places they loved when they were whole. They haven't been whole for awhile. They have been drifting apart, trapped in depression since the death of their daughter Christine due to meningitis. Venice is supposed to reinvigorate them. Instead what starts as a pleasant trip soon turns incomprehensible. One day they see elderly twin sisters in a restaurant. Laura runs into them in the restroom and discovers that one of the sisters is blind and claims to be a psychic. She tells Laura that she sees Christine there with her and her husband and that she is happy. When Laura tells John this story he claims they are nothing more than charlatans and goes out of his way to avoid them. Yet fate has other plans. That night after getting lost in the labyrinth of Venice they again meet the sisters in a restaurant and the sisters are very enthusiastic to meet Laura again.

John, in his cynicism, thinks it's the sisters sinking their claws into Laura, while Laura insists it's because the sisters have a message for John from Christine; he is to leave Venice at once because he is in danger. John scoffs at this but when they get back to their hotel there's a message that their son Johnnie, who is away at boarding school, is sick with appendicitis and Laura thinks this is the reason that Christine wanted them to leave. Laura is able to get an early flight out but John has to wait. When the plane was supposed to be in the air he sees his wife and the sisters on the grand canal. Thinking there must have been a mix up or the sisters are up to something he spends the day trying to find his wife and the sisters. But perhaps he should have paid more attention to Christine's warning and the sister's insight that John himself has the power of psychic understanding.

"Don't Look Now" is an odd little story, perhaps best remembered by the movie with the same name. The problem I faced with this story is that we are given this glimpse into the marriage of John and Laura but it's as if we are looking through glass from the famous Murano workshops. There's this weird distance that stops us from forming any real connection with the couple. This entire story is written in such a way that the reader always feels like an outsider. It's not just the lack of connection with John and Laura but "Don't Look Now" was written with an insider's knowledge of Venice. Of course during the time period Du Maurier wrote this story her readers would have been more familiar with Venice as it was a common tourist destination but that doesn't help me. I've sadly never been to Venice so the way John rattles off locales makes me think he's smug and is just another way I am excluded from becoming a part of the story. But then again, John is kind of an idiot. His ham-handed approach to finding his wife to his complete unwillingness to actually listen to the sisters means he gets what's coming to him. As for the supernatural of it all? Du Maurier has done better, but that ending. It is a shocker. Mostly because it was so vaguely foreshadowed.

But if you've only read Daphne Du Maurier's novels you truly haven't experienced her range as an author. Yes, her novels are some of the best and most beautifully written and suspenseful books you'll ever read from Rebecca to Jamaica Inn to The Scapegoat, but they often cover the same ground and don't even touch on the supernatural and strange that her short stories, such as "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" delve into. It's like Du Maurier felt a freedom in this shorter format that let her handle the outre, the other, and the persecuted that will surprise you in their range and occasional depravity. Each story is easily worthy of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone with a supernatural agency at work in the everyday lives of our heroes and heroines that is never quite fully explained. In "Blue Lenses" Mrs. Marda West has ocular surgery with special lenses inserted to regain her sight only to open her eyes and see that everyone has an animal's head. At first she thinks it's a joke being perpetrated on her but soon comes to realize that these visions are giving her insight into the true nature of people. People whom she trusted are animals of dubious nature and ill repute.

"The Blue Lenses," besides showing this "otherness," showcases an ongoing theme in these shorter works. Du Maurier's protagonists often think that they are the object of a joke being played at their expense. They are the victim of a con and the proper authorities are often viewed as conspiring against them. From "Split Second" to "La Sainte-Vierge" to "Don't Look Now" to the aforementioned "Blue Lenses" delusion and trickery are what everything hinges on. But this paranoia that has these people confused by what they see, hoping they are mistaken, actually shines a light on Du Maurier's true interest, plumbing the depths of humanity. The fact that these characters are so willing to believe that someone would go to the trouble of conning them shows a fear of the "other," a fear of what people are capable of. Because looking deeper, past the supernatural trappings, at the root these stories show that people are capable of murder.

In fact sometimes Du Maurier forgoes the supernatural entirely and tells a tale that is, in the end, just about murder. In fact my favorite story, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," is about a troubled girl who kills RAF men she meets. Of course it wouldn't be a true Du Maurier story if you weren't bamboozled into thinking it was a love story until the very last page, but again and again that is why these stories work, she is continually subverting your expectations. Yes you could boil this all down to man versus nature, be it's man's inner nature or actual nature or something against nature, but trying to condense it down does an injustice to the writing. Du Maurier through stories about killer birds, "The Birds," and killer usherettes, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," and women joining mountain cults that may be leper colonies, "Monte Verità," touches on so many truths and so many weighty topics that you can see why she was always miffed that people called her a "romance" author. She is so much more. If you don't believe, just pick up this book. I think it will change your mind.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Daphne Du Maurier, Don't Look Now, Du Maurier December Deux, Jamaica Inn, Kiss Me Again Stranger, Monte Verita, Psychic, Rebecca, Rod Serling, Short Story, The Birds, The Scapegoat, The Twilight Zone, Venice