In recent years, I’ve read My Cousin Rachel and a collection of her excellently eerie short stories, but I never knew till recently that Du Maurier ever wrote anything even approaching science fiction. The House on the Strand is partly about time travel, but also about the dangers of literally losing one’s grip on reality. Richard Young, an academic man in his mid-forties, agrees to play guinea pig for his professor friend Magnus, who claims he has concocted a potion that allows one to travel back in time. Richard takes the potion and becomes fascinated not only by the sensation of time travel, but also by the beautiful Isolda Carminowe, a fourteenth century noblewoman who, along with everyone else in her time period, can neither hear, feel, nor see Richard. If Richard attempts to touch anyone while back in time, he is jolted back to the future (yeah, I used that phrase) so violently that he feels acute pain and nausea.

These “trips” take on a metaphorical aspect as it becomes clear that Richard is addicted to time travel. He loses interest in real life, even to the point of neglecting his wife and his two stepsons. (To be fair, he makes it clear that he was never very interested in them to begin with.) When he first “comes to” after each trip, he is confronted by two immediate difficulties. First, though he has traveled in time mentally, his physical body has remained in the present, traveling spatially as he has walked through the empty fields and castles of the past. This means he sometimes wakes up just as he is about to step over the edge of a ravine, or get hit by a car. Second, he cannot immediately shake the sense that what he just witnessed did not actually just happen. He feels a sense of urgency unrelated to anything that is happening in his own time. The parallels to drug addiction are made clear in the descriptions of Richard’s exhaustion, shaky hands, bloodshot eyes, disorientation, and willingness to do anything, including risking his life, to get one more chance to find out what happens to the people he’s encountered in the past.

The House on the Strand is not a page-turner, but it’s so simple that it goes fairly quickly. Rather than giving us the absorbing, gothicism-infused work one might expect from her, Du Maurier has written a quiet novel about an addict whose drug of choice just happens to be time travel. Richard Young is hardly likable, but he is sympathetic to anyone who’s ever lost herself in any pursuit society deems a pastime. Watching Isolda and her lover, Richard narrates, “… I felt this strange disturbance, a sense of loss, utterly unlike anything I might experience in my own time, had I seen two lovers from a window… Intense involvement, and intense compassion too… And I had no way of explaining my sense of participation in all they did…” Reading this, I was reminded of a fairly famous quote from Michael Ende’s fabulous The Neverending Story: “If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless… you probably won’t understand what Bastian did next.” It’s hard to feel sorry for Richard when he’s being a jerk in the real world, but I can exactly understand his feelings when he’s watching historical figures of the past live their lives before his eyes.

As is typical of Du Maurier, the prose is beautiful and understated, and the resolution, while seemingly open-ended, is actually quite satisfying and rife with implication. Flitting about the borders of the main story are barely-veiled subtexts of homosexual and homosocial desire that imbue Richard’s time travel experiences with a tinge of the Freudian, though these elements are so basic I wouldn’t say they open up the book to full-on psychoanalysis. The House on the Strand is no Rebecca, nor is it even hard science fiction or romantic fantasy, but it is a thoughtful, intelligent diversion, which is so much more than one can say about eighty percent of what passes for literature nowadays.

Review: Guys, I am super sad. I love Daphne du Maurier, I really do. Rebecca is probably my favorite book of all time. Her short stories are fantastic – I could read them over and over and over. So why, why, why could I not love My Cousin Rachel? It was just OK. And it really pains me to say that. I had set the book up in my mind to be as mind-blowingly awesome as Rebecca. And for a while there, I thought that was what I was getting. Right off the bat, the writing is beautiful, and it gives me chills. Du Maurier sets the book up to be just as eerie as I could have hoped for. But, listen. After about 90 pages, Phillip Ashley (you know, that main character guy?) annoyed the bejeezus out of me.

Warning: This review will contain slight spoilers as I vent my frustration. I wouldn’t venture beyond this point unless you’ve already read the book or don’t want to.

My Cousin Rachel centers around Phillip Ashley, a young man was orphaned at a young age and raised by his uncle, Ambrose. One winter, Ambrose runs off to Italy and meets a woman, Rachel. They fall in love and get married. Then Phillip starts getting some really weird letters from his uncle, talking about how he thinks Rachel might be killing him and that he can trust no one. Then Ambrose dies and Phillip swears to get revenge. Then Rachel comes to England to visit Phillip. Phillip almost immediately forgets about his plans for revenge and falls in love with Rachel. Then, on his 25th birthday, he hands the estate over to Rachel, completely ignoring every good bit of advice he had been given concerning Rachel and his money. And then all of a sudden, Phillip starts to come down with the same strange sickness that eventually killed Ambrose. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.

As I said before, I really wanted to like this book. And for a while I did. The beginning was great. I was all for Phillip getting revenge on Rachel. Yes! Kill her! Kill her dead! But then Phillip actually met Rachel, and all of the bad feelings dissipated instantly. For page upon page of the novel, they live happily together, building the perfect garden, repairing the house, visiting all of the people that live on their estate, hosting Christmas parties. Where was the action? The suspense? I fully understand that the point of the story is that Phillip is blinded by his infatuation with Rachel, which ultimately ends in much sadness. But I could barely read My Cousin Rachel without wanting to violently shake Phillip and then throw the book across the room.

Not only was I frustrated by Phillip, I was also expecting the book to be just as creepy and eerie as Rebecca is. However, as I mentioned above, a lot of the book was kind of boring because everything seemed to be going fine. There was no dead wife that haunted their estate (Uncle Ambrose definitely doesn’t count). There was no overly critical housekeeper trying to convince anyone to kill themselves. If I wasn’t putting the book down because of Phillip’s idiocy, it was because there didn’t seem to be much of anything happening. I read this for the R.I.P. VI challenge, and I was expecting it to be much more suspenseful all the way through.

But of course, My Cousin Rachel was still written by Daphne du Maurier, and the writing is still fantastic. Each description is so vivid. The words themselves were so fun to read, and there were even times when I had to go back and read a passage aloud because it was so awesome. Here is a great example from the novel, in which Phillip describes first seeing Rachel after a hard day of wandering around his estate (that’s all he ever seems to do):

“A new softness came to her by candelight that was not with her in the day. It was as if the brightness of morning and the duller shades of afternoon were given up to purposes of work, of practicality, making a briskness of movement that was definite and cool; and now with evening closed in, the shutters fastened, the weather banished, and the house withdrawn into itself, she shone with a radiance that had lain concealed about her person until now. There was more colour to her cheeks and to her hair, great depth to her eyes, and whether she turned her head to speak, or moved to the bookcase to pick up a volume, or bent to pat Don as he lay stretched out before the fire, there was an easy grace in all she did which gave to every movement fascination. I wondered in these moments how I could ever have thought her unremarkable.” (186)

I just love how we can feel Phillip’s admiration for Rachel in this passage. And not once did du Maurier have to spell out what Rachel looked like. Instead, we are just given a description of how someone could be beautiful, and not why. She’s not blonde, she’s not thin, she doesn’t have a heaving bosom. Rachel could be any woman.

Unfortunately, the writing was not enough to make me fall in love with this book. So, I’m sorry, My Cousin Rachel. But you really disappointed me.

tl;dr:  The actual creepy parts were too few and far between for me to feel truly haunted by this book. Also, Phillip is an idiot.

Rating: 2/5.

I haven’t been shopping for books lately–oh, except for ordering a set of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence novels, when my old copies started fraying to dust in my hands.

It might be said I am sated with books.  There are thousands of books in my house.  Many of them call as I walk by:  “Read me, read me!”  And eventually I do.

If a storm temporarily shut down the city, as happened last January, I wouldn’t need to leave the bedroom.  There are 100 books  in the bedroom alone.  I could read Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest or The Collected Stories of William Trevor.  I could read through the storm, padding out to the kitchen occasionally to make sandwiches for my family.

But today I had to buy a gift, and, due to the internet’s influence, I had a long list of books to scrutinize. The reviews said, Good!  Good!  Good!   Reviewers just aren’t always truthful, though.  I was contented at the prospect of browsing.

First on the list was Deborah Lawrenson’s The Lantern, promoted as a homage to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Now this wasn’t just for me, you understand, though I wanted to read it.  I thought of it as a gift for The Relative.  She has no books in her nursing home room.  None.

And she likes Daphne du Maurier.  So I thought:  AHA!  This “homage” is the book for her.

Only I sat and read a few pages and it didn’t seem very well-written.  I was disappointed.  Somehow I couldn’t see fobbing this off on the Relative.  It really seemed a better idea to buy her a book by Daphne du Maurier.  So I found a copy of My Cousin Rachel and threw it in my basket.

Naturally I couldn’t leave without buying at least ONE book for myself.  Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan, a 1993 thriller being promoted as a neglected classic,  seems readable and has an intriguing opening paragraph:

“This goes back to the letter Susan Morrow’s first husband Edward sent her last September.  He had written a book, a novel, and would she like to read it?  Susan was shocked because, except for Christmas cards from his second wife signed ‘Love,’ she hadn’t heard from Edward in twenty years.”

Of course I am gullible about “lost masterpieces,” but I hope it will be entertaining, and I can definitely pass this on to the Relative when I’m done.

The other book I bought?  Lev Grossman’s The Magician King.  I love fantasy novels, and since everyone is raving about this, and some reviewers even compared it to the Narnia books, I decided to give it a shot.  I CAN’T read George R. R. Martin, the novel of the summer, but I need to keep up with SOME pop novels.

I am definitely stuck with this one.   The Relative thinks fantasy novels are “weird.”

That Smouldering Look

Like so many people who have read this book and have never been able to forget it, I was instantly captivated by Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (published in July of 1951) from the first time I read it as a teenager. Since then I have read and re-read this marvelous book several more times, and I think I have finally managed to put my finger on the hook which was from the very start securely lodged in my cheek.
From the opening chapters an image of Rachel emerged in my imagination as a Franco Zeffirrelli heroine –  a delicate combined portrait of Madame Bovary and Jane Eyre in looks – but painted in   fine Italian chiaroscuro.
In my imagination a streak of light catches Rachel’s very soignèe, very tightly combed and knotted  dark hair, and shows off to its best advantage her beautifully shaped head. I see the simple and exceedingly elegant cut of her black dress, and her dark, suggestive beauty offset by her pale and sensitive hands, and  the creamy flesh of her slender neck emerging above the modest neckline. I see the dark and fading browns and greens of a renaissance landscape with plane trees and cypresses in the background…  I see some of Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ in her as well… I hear a Donizetti aria or two –  “Regnava Nel Silenzio” and “Una Furtiva Lagrima” –  because of course such passion as she may inspire inevitably compels the headlong rushing in of fools, as well as its predictable aftermath.
But above and beyond all of  that, the most insistent, most confusing, and most disorienting  sound I hear is Phillip’s voice:
It is a voice that comes out of his mouth without ever being his. I now know that this is because it is in fact a woman’s voice. – or more accurately, the voice of a castrato taken over by a woman, – perhaps like that of  Pauline Viardot’s Orpheus singing “J’ai Perdu Mon Eurydice” in a mist of grief and passion. Despite being cast as that epitome of maleness, the English country gentleman, Philips’ voice has the timbre of extreme sexual ambiguity.
As a writer, Daphne du Maurier is a superb ventriloquist, and her throwing of Phillip’s voice quite tricked my cognitive ear, though my intuitive ear was not so easily persuaded. It took me all these many disquieting years to discover that no man could ever speak of a woman in the way Phillip speaks of Rachel, but only a woman who finds others of her own sex a source of confounding fascination, which is to say, a lesbian.
When I construe Phillip as a young dyke, ‘his’ voice, a breaking mezzo/contralto,  fits exactly.
The richness of this book is that it is teeming with the unseen ghosts of literary and cultural symbols   – the ghosts of the Brontës (during whose lifetimes the novel is set), the noble and tormented ghost of Radclyffe Hall’s Stephen, the ghost of Lucrezia Borgia with the whiff of poison clinging to her reputed ring, and perhaps even the tantalising ghost of the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile – the smile which intimates there is something behind it that we could never see.  The atmosphere is filled with the anxious echoes of a past that is persistently insinuating itself into the present.
The chord Du Maurier strikes is rich in resonance and harmonics. It goes on echoing and reverberating, because throughout its long vibration, which in this novel is the tension of a prolonged falling in love, the sound of voice and the image of the speaker appear not to be the same.
Phillip,the first person protagonist, seems completely unable to hear his own voice. Nor does he seem able to grasp the implications of his emotions or his actions. He consistently and unswervingly evinces the bafflement of a young girl who falls in love with another young girl, or a  woman, without ever having the slightest inkling that despite everything they are led to believe about what they should expect to encounter within the strictly heterosexual constraints of conventional romances of the common and garden sort,  girls do in fact fall hopelessly and irrevocably in love with women.

Laburnum

Rachel captivates Phillip from the start, and the secret of her power over him rests in no small part on his utter lack of preparedness for such an encounter. Long before he meets her he has created an unattractive image of her which he is determined to dislike. He is certain that he will be impervious to her. He has no idea that she is the kind of woman who captivates without effort, and with an inescapable finality. Nor does he know he is exactly the kind of person who always falls fatally in love.

Philip has modeled himself so rigidly upon the template of cousin Ambrose, about twenty years his senior, that he is completely purblind to his own love-struck condition. Like a child in grow-up clothes – or rather like a girl who is determined to do a good job of playing a boy’s part in the school play, he has thrown himself into the role, and plays it whole-heartedy and well:  So well indeed that he himself is lost in it.
In fact, the the part of the English country gentleman is very nearly overplayed by him.
The relatively simple and uncomplicated virtues required of him in this part make him an easy read for Rachel, who has behind her the experience of surviving an unstable and precarious childhood and girlhood in the questionable care of her dissolute parents who married her off to a reckless Italian noble by the name of Sangalletti. Now there’s a a name that seems to carry in its sound a bloody (and decidedly un-saintly) harmonic, which turns out to be  quite ironically apposite, since he died in a duel. This wealth of  experience has endowed her with the strategies she needed to survive in a much more dangerous world than a rambling old country house in peaceful Cornwall could ever be.
When Rachel creates an exotic garden paradise in which she and Eve and the Serpent are one, we readers are at once uneasily aware that Phillip, a young girl in boy’s clothing, could never be her match. Ambrose, Phillip’s older cousin who was Rachel’s husband, like the ghost in Hamlet’s, did not survive his marriage, and has died under mysterious circumstances.

Pods of the Laburnum.

Even though deceased Ambrose and androgynous Phillip are central characters; besides a butler, a guardian, a dog, and a dead man, there is not one convincing living and breathing male in this story. Even Rainaldi, Rachel’s  sinister Italian friend and lawyer, with his slight build and waspish manner seems more like a peevish spinster than a real man.

Rachel is the dark lady of Phillip’s sonnets, but she is also the Muse – the Goddess – and as such we know that with her mysterious beauty, her ‘otherness’, elusiveness  and  unattainability  she can never be cast as a wife – at least, not for long. Doom hangs over us all from the start: One imagines that one can hear in Rachel’s and Philip’s dangerous connection the ominous sound of of two tectonic plates dragging against each other on the way to their earth-shattering climax:
I know that reading this book as a young girl, I sensed all of this without ever being able to know or grasp any of it. Like Phillip, without noticing what was happening to me, I too had fallen in love with Rachel right away. Even the very seeds she saved – or hid in her darkly ambiguously sinister manner – had a name suggestive of delicate blossoms and  warm lips – Laburnum….

Rachel my torment….

I have also wondered if there was not also a bit of a modulated Hamlet – Hamlet in a minor key – secreted in the manner in which Du Maurier configures Philip in the plot: Ambrose, the much older husband,  is already deceased when the story begins, and the reason for his death is suspected poisoning. True the finger points more directly at Rachel than at Rainaldi, who is a somewhat distant stand in for the Claudius figure, but both Rachel and Rainaldi stand side by side in the sinister reputations of  duplicitous Italians who tend to disposed of their rivals with undetectable poisons. Philip, for his part loathes and despises  the machiavellian Rainaldi, his vaunted rival, in much the same manner that Hamlet despises his step-father Claudius.

As with Hamlet, there is even the slight shadow of incest in Philips’ hopes of supplanting his father-figure. Ambrose is present in his ghostly form throughout the story.  Philip is waiting to inherit his kingdom. There is even an English Desdemona in Louise – a young and innocent woman who loves Phillip – and she is the daughter of his guardian, the prudent Nick Kendall, who is of course the Polonius figure. Then of course there is the matter of Rachel’s final accident….

Daphne Du Maurier admitted that her inspiration for Rachel was Ellen Doubleday the wife of her American publisher. We shall never know whether or not this particular passion was fulfilled, as was her affair with the famous actress Gertrude Lawrence.
I am now unable to escape the realisation that the ghost in this book was Du Maurier herself, with her impeccable persona of a very proper and very married English lady who nonetheless possessed the incongruous, undeniable, spot-on, pitch-perfect modulation of a lesbian sensibility.

Postscript.

Last night (September fifth 2011) I came across this quote of Daphne Du Maurier in a 1977 interview, and it finally confirmed for me something I always knew intuitively….

It was the answer to a question asked by (unnamed) the interviewer

“In My Cousin Rachel, was Rachel good or evil?”

“Lots of people have asked that and, to tell the truth, I don’t know. You see, I was Philip when I wrote the book.”

Elaine Dundy in her her wonderful introduction to another Du Maurier book I’ll Never be Young Again, could easily have been referring to the following passage when she described Du Maurier as “One of the great monologists in twentieth-century fiction.  This is the passage in which Philip recalls the first and only night he ever spent with Rachel.

“What happened on those first few hours of my birthday will remain. If there was passion, I have forgotten it. If there was tenderness, it is with me still. Wonder is mine forever that a woman accepting love has no defense. Perhaps this is the secret that they hold to bind us to them. Making reserve of it until the last. I would not know, having no other for comparison. She was my first and last.”

One is hard-pressed in this passage to hear even the trace of a man’s voice:  Instead one hears a wavering double note, that of a young girl discovering a potent and and revelatory nature of lesbian love.  Listen to Propertius expressing the same sentiment in his clear male voice - “ cuncta tuus sepelivit amor, nec femina post te /ulla dedit collo dulcia vincla meo.” – ‘Your love has wedged in the grave all others – nor since you did, has any women placed around my neck as sweet a bond’ -  (my translation.)

Compared to Propertius, in Philip’s utterance pessesses, to my ear at least, the travested, but still unmistakably recognisable voice of a woman.

“There are some women, Philip, good women, very possibly, who through no fault of their own impel disaster. Whatever they touch turns to tragedy.”

My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne Du Maurier, is the story of one such woman and the disaster she wreaks in the lives of two men. Philip Ashley is orphaned at a young age and his cousin Ambrose, twenty years his senior, brings him up as his ward and his heir. At forty-three years of age, it seems unlikely that Ambrose will ever marry. But when his doctors send him to Italy to improve his health, Ambrose makes the acquaintance of a distant relative of his, a young widow named Rachel. Thrown together by their mutual passion for gardening, Ambrose becomes enamored with Rachel. Philip learns in a letter that his cousin and mentor has married and will not be returning home to England for some time.

Jealous of Ambrose’s new relationship, Philip sulks at home on the estate, his mind painting pictures of Rachel as a harpy, a monster, or worse. Ambrose’s letters become fewer and farther between till all of a sudden a startling epistle arrives. Ambrose’s distorted handwriting informs Philip that he is sick, perhaps unto death, and contains veiled intimations that his wife Rachel might be the one responsible for his sickness. Philip races to Florence but comes too late. Ambrose is dead, Rachel is gone, and no one can enlighten him as to her whereabouts. He returns home a sad man, but still the heir to Ambrose’s estate and fortune.

Weeks later the mysterious Rachel shows up in England to bring back her deceased husband’s personal effects. Philip, influenced by the paranoia in Ambrose’s last letter, has grown to hate the very thought of her. He is surprised to discover that she is merely an ordinary–and very likeable–woman. He invites her to stay for a while at the estate to meet the tenants and see the home that Ambrose loved so much. As the weeks go by, his liking for Rachel grows and grows. Scraps of unfinished letters by Ambrose surface directly accusing his wife of poisoning him, but by now Philip is too infatuated to pay them any attention. He is no longer interested in investigating whether Rachel murdered her husband, until the question finally arises: does she intend to do the same thing again?

I’ve been progressing at a snail’s pace through most of my books these days, a chapter here and there whenever I can fit it in. This book, however, only took me two days to complete. Written in the same suspenseful voice as Du Maurier’s masterpiece Rebecca, the book keeps you enthralled till the very end. The characters and settings are well described and memorable, and Ambrose Ashley’s line, “Rachel, my torment,” will echo with you long after you have closed the cover.

Image via Wikipedia

Writing about his college years, James Thurber tells the story of Haskins, an agriculture student who takes up journalism, “possibly on the ground that when farming went to hell he could fall back on newspaper work.”

Haskins is assigned the animal husbandry beat, which comprises cows, sheep, and over two hundred horses.

Unfortunately, he is shy and doesn’t know how to use a typewriter. He writes slowly, and his stories are dull.

One day Haskins’ editor assigns him to bring in news from the horse pavilion. Haskins later comes back saying he has a story.

The editor, hoping for something more interesting than he’s been getting, says, “Well, start it off snappily.”

A couple of hours later, Haskins turns in a paper that starts with the following sentence:

“Who has noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the animal husbandry building?”

That’s the other reason I’m not a journalist: When it comes to writing leads, I’m several steps behind Haskins.

Under most circumstances,  I wouldn’t care. I don’t make my living working for a newspaper.

But a lead sentence corresponds in at least one way to the first line of a short story or novel. They both catch the reader’s attention, draw him into the text, make him want to read on.

And there’s this novel I’m working on. And this short story…

And, like Haskins, I’ve heard from some of my critique partners that my first lines leave something to be desired.

After some thought and a brief cooling-off period, I’ve forgiven them and admitted they might be right.

The sad thing is that before my abject humiliation, I never paid much attention to first lines. The sadder thing is that I can quote so many.

Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom noticed it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken near the elbow.

When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her.

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.

They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.

And so on. With all those lines suspended in my brain, you’d think I’d have caught onto why I remember them. And why they’re important.

Here’s the way it works.

A bookstore browser sees a book on the shelf. If the writer is lucky, it sits face out. He takes the volume down, looks at the front cover, the back cover, the first paragraph…and then either buys it or walks away.

And the whole process happens in under ten seconds.

The first line of a novel can make the difference between a sale and a return. Between another advance and a canceled contract.

There’s a lot riding on Scarlett O’Hara not being beautiful. And our not knowing Huck Finn. And what happened when the lights went off.

How does one get to be that good?

The same way one gets to Carnegie Hall, I guess.

Practice. Practice.

~~~~~~~~~~

And blog blog blog.

Because my concern isn’t just for novels and money and fame. I’d also like the gentle readers who land on To write… to linger longer than the first sentence.

~~~~~~~~~~

And please discount the business about money and fame. Unless you’re Tom Clancy or Stephen King, those aren’t really part of the package. But they sound good, so I throw them in.

~~~~~~~~~~

Sorry about that linger longer. Against some things there is no defense.

Du Maurier is most well known for her novel “Rebecca” which was made into a film in 1940 directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. I read the book many years ago and was gripped by the gothic tale of the deceased first Mrs de Winter (the titular Rebecca) whose memory continues to haunt her husband, his second wife (also the narrator) and Mrs Danvers, the malevolent housekeeper. I also read My Cousin Rachel, an excellent novel about jealousy and the havoc it can wreak upon a relationship. Du Maurier also wrote the short story upon which Hitchcock’s film “The Birds” was based.

Du Maurier is a mistress of suspense and an amazing story teller in the classic mould.  Although her work was usually sold as romance, her writing was in fact far more sinister and gothic than the genre usually allows for. Her technical grasp of plot and tension is excellent and she keeps the reader turning the pages until the early hours of the morning.

“Don’t Look Now” is the first of the five stories within the collection. The story is probably familiar to most people from the film version starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. I had never seen the film and so the plot was unknown to me. The ridiculous ending made me laugh a little (which I know was not the author’s intention!) but I’m interested to see the film version which is supposed to be truly creepy.

The story in the collection that affected me the most was the third one, ”A Border-Line Case”. In this story, Shelagh, a young actress, is the only witness to the sudden death of her father. She takes a trip to Ireland to find an old friend of her father’s and the resulting events seem fairly innocuous until you get to the last two paragraphs when it becomes disturbing in more ways than one.

Du Maurier is a bit of a one trick pony and at times she reminds me of Wilkie Collins in terms of the suspenseful subject matter she chooses and the way in which she handles it. However if you haven’t read Rebecca it’s definitely a must read and my favourite of hers so far.

Daphne du Maurier as a young woman

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier — passion, suspense, and fear.  Yea!

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou — for inspiration.  Of course I’ve read it twice before, but I can’t wait to read it again.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee — it’s the 50th anniversary.  And can you really ever read this book too many times.  I love the story.  I love these characters.  Nuff said.

The House at Riverton by Kate Morton — I know absolutely nothing about this book, but it looks to be about 500 pages of mystery-solving, all winding back to a society party in 1924.  I can already feel the sea breeze blowing and the warm sand.  A beach book for sure.

Today’s Book Blogger Appreciation Week topic has to do with books. Books that you heard about on another blog, read and then loved! Well, way back in April, Raych over at Books I Done Read reviewed My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier and based on her review alone, I knew that I had to read the book.

She included a lot of CAPS in her review which told me that I must drop everything and read it now. She also stretched her words out reallyyyyy longgggg to get her point across. When Raych does that, my ears perk up. I can’t help it.

So I read it and I LOVED it and now I am using CAPS to describe my OVERALL EXCITEMENT OVER IT. It hasn’t stayed on my shelf since I’ve read it. I have been lending out to everyone I know!

What great books have you discovered?

22. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (1951)
Length: 352 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Started: 10 September 2009
Finished: 12 September 2009
Where did it come from? From Paperback Swap
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 18 August 2009
Why do I have it? I like Daphne du Maurier as an author and several books by this author on my TBR pile.

Phillip Ashley idolizes his cousin Ambrose having been raised by him on Ambrose’s Cornish estate. When Ambrose goes to Italy, meets and falls in love with Rachel, the widow of an Italian nobleman, then marries her; Phillip is extremely happy for his cousin. As time goes by, Ambrose becomes deathly ill and suspicion falls on Rachel as being the cause of his illness.

Phillip has discovered that he is in love with Rachel himself and when she returns to England after Ambrose’s death, Phillip tries to ignore the rumors about her and rashly settles Ambrose’s estate in her favor. Once Ambrose’s estate is settled, Rachel grows cold towards Phillip and he suffers a similar illness to the one that caused Ambrose’s death. I loved this story and give it an A+!

I wanted to write.

I didn't particularly want to say anything wise or witty or even worth reading.  I just wanted to  … write. I wanted to feel my fingers moving over the keyboard (as in yesterday's writing exercise, actually), and to experience the sense of familiarity and — safety? — that this activity brings me.

Maybe "safety" isn't the right word. 

When I'm writing academic pieces or creative nonfiction, it's not about being safe.  It's about finding the right words to express an argument or a theme. It's about working with language (and letting it work upon me) to give shape to my own unique voice and ideas.  It's about expressing something that's real and true to me, with intellectual and emotional integrity.

And that involves risk-taking.  Hell, it doesn't just involve it.  It demands it. And it can be challenging, intimidating, and even downright scary sometimes.

But this morning's writing — right here, right now, as I sip my first cup of coffee — is very much about safety.  It's about still being in my nightgown, watching the brightening of sky through my study window. It's about  listening to the slow, soft music that's streaming through my computer's iTunes program  and a chance to contemplate the day ahead of me.  It's about the sense of peace that writing here brings me, knowing that in the back of my mind I'm processing the upcoming tasks and projects of the day at the same time — but I don't have to give them my full attention quite yet.  They're simply percolating for the present.

Writing is my challenge and my sanctuary.  And if that sounds just a wee bit melodramatic, it absolutely is, because as I was typing those words, the final line of My Cousin Rachel (Henry Koster, USA, 1952) with Richard Burton and Olivia De Havilland, sprang into my mind … 

As I recall, there's Richard Burton in a billowing cape at the edge of a churning ocean, back to the camera, sea-drenched boulders in front of him. Agonizing over whether his cousin Olivia De Havilland, whom he loves, is actually evil or if he's misread her and caused terrible things to happen (see how I'm avoiding spoilers?), he speculates inconclusively (and in voice-over, soliloquy-fashion), finally intoning, "Rachel … my blessed, blessed torment!" as the film fades to black.

Or something like that.

I wouldn't say that writing ever my torment, though, even in my most blocked, angst-ridden moments. In fact, this morning it feels like a blessing, a sort of quiet space where I can come to write who I am and get in touch with that before the craziness of my day begins.

A blessing, indeed.

My Cousin Rachel
By Daphne Du Maurier
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Incorporated
Pub. Date: March 2009
ISBN-13: 9781402217098
394pp

The blurb from Barnes and Noble:

Philip Ashley’s older cousin Ambrose, who raised the orphaned Philip as his own son, has died in Rome. Philip, the heir to Ambrose’s beautiful English estate, is crushed that the man he loved died so far from home. He is also suspicious. While in Italy, Ambrose fell in love with Rachel, a beautiful English and Italian woman. But the final, brief letters Ambrose wrote hint that his love had turned to paranoia and fear.

Now Rachel has arrived at Philip’s newly inherited estate. Could this exquisite woman, who seems to genuinely share Philip’s grief at Ambrose’s death, really be as cruel as Philip imagined? Or is she the kind, passionate woman with whom Ambrose fell in love? Philip struggles to answer this question, knowing Ambrose’s estate, and his own future, will be destroyed if his answer is wrong.

The Short of It:

A very enjoyable read from start to finish.

My Thoughts:

I cannot believe that this book was originally published in 1951! I read Rebecca ages ago and loved it but I had never even heard of My Cousin Rachel until just a few months ago. I’m so glad I did.

This is one of those stories where you sort of know how things will play out, but you continue to turn the pages because the characters are so richly drawn and the evil is almost too subtle to pick up that you feel the need to really focus on every line as some little clue might pop up. I just love these types of stories.

Philip is so utterly taken with Rachel that he is incredibly frustrating at times, but the dynamic between to the two characters is so tightly wound, that you just expect him (or her) to snap at any moment. The descriptive details of the estate itself were quite well written. I felt as if I were walking the grounds myself at times.

In the end, it was an incredibly satisfying read and if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy soon. I also cannot say enough about the cover of the re-release. It’s stunning.

I won this copy over at Peeking Between The Pages. Thanks Dar!

Philip, the protagonist of My Cousin Rachel, has been raised by his bachelor cousin Ambrose.  Ambrose goes away to Italy, marries there, and a few years later sends a letter to Philip intimating that he is in danger, and asking Philip to come to Italy straight away.  When Philip gets there, Ambrose has died, and Rachel is gone.  He conceives a hatred for her, believing that she was responsible for Ambrose’s death; but when she comes to stay with him in England, he falls for her straight away.  Is she evil?  Did she poison Ambrose, and is she poisoning Philip now?  Spooooooky.

I liked Rachel.  You can see why Philip falls in love with her – like Rebecca, she absolutely deserves to have the book called after her.  And like the protagonist of Rebecca, Philip is never completely sure where he stands, but unlike poor Mrs. de Winter, Philip is determined to be sure (act sure).  For me, this made all the difference – he drove me insane and I wanted to slap him.  Seriously, guy, ever hear of black and white thinking?  Also called splitting?  This is symptomatic of some really unpleasant personality disorders, and you could maybe think about curbing that tendency.  I couldn’t figure out why his godfather’s daughter liked him so much, good heavens.

On the other hand, Philip’s extremism makes possible something I love, which is that we see Rachel through his eyes, but that the rest of the characters all have things to say about her too.  So we can see that other people are reacting to her charm, the same way Philip does, but we can also see things that Philip refuses to look at or acknowledge – her extravagance, the way it looks to have her living in the house with him.  It keeps you guessing, and you never are sure whether she’s poisoning him, and poisoned Ambrose.  Per usual Daphne du Maurier writes beautifully and uses some gorgeous images.

Er, but it’s still not as good as Rebecca.  I love me some Rebecca.

Other reviews:

books i done read
Bookfoolery and Babble
Stephanie’s Confessions of a Book-a-holic
The Literate Housewife
a lovely shore breeze
S. Krishna’s Books
Once Upon a Bookshelf
Stuck in a Book
we be reading
book-a-rama

Okay, so you know how I mentioned my trip to Bart’s Books in yesterday’s Salon Post? Well, we did go to Bart’s and I did take some fabulous pics for the Spotlight on Bookstores post that I’ll be sending to Dawn over at She is Too Fond of Books sometime in July. However, what I definitely did not count on, was all of us getting hit with the same flu bug that hit my son last week.

Imagine me, in a bookstore surrounded by books. Bliss, right? Okay, now imagine me getting queasy around said books. Now imagine the Girl getting queasy and then the Hub. We had to cut the trip short and drive straight home. However, I did check to see if they had any of the books on my list and they did not. It was a sad day in Ti’s world.

When we got home, we all went our separate ways and took comfort the only way we knew how. The Hub took a nap. The Girl sat on the couch and zoned out on Phineas and Ferb and I crashed on the couch with The Link and My Cousin Rachel.

I am completely hooked on these books right now. They are completely different books yet so fascinating that I am actually alternating between the two of them every couple of chapters. So all was not lost. I still managed to spend the day reading and it turned out to be a good day for it.

By the way, we are all much better now