‘Barrabas came to us by the sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.’
Wonderment and curiosity dance off the page here! Maybe every writer has the one perfect book? If so, then Isabel Allende’s novel, The House of the Spirits seems to me her most magical, enduring and appealing. Her world is full of imperfect human beings trying to live their lives with courage, humour and even savagery. Historical panorama and all absorbing intimacy combine compellingly.
This opening cast a spell on me when I first read it and can still remember the Liverpool to Bolton train journey disappearing in a hypnotic haze due to the mesmerising sensuality of Allende’s words.
- Who is Barrabas?
- Why can a notebook save a life?
- Why would Clara become mute?
And who is telling us all these things and WHY?
I named my daughter Clara because of this book. What greater compliment to an author?
WANDERING THROUGH (mothering) – WUTHERING HEIGHTS!
It has only just struck me, that if writing is inevitably about life/lives and living – the birth of the novelist, historical documentation and physical/emotional experience then of course the written is always, without a doubt, about death. Meandering through Wuthering Heights I recall a phrase that reminded me of my mother – “I cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul” ! The misery of human life then …. to be lifeless and soul-less signifies an endurance for psychological and physical control in the novel that generates the obvious theme of ‘eternal returns’ – an endurance for DEATH itself.
Maybe books save us from our eternal return to our own life and soul through the juxtaposition of life and death – those desires that Heathcliff himself is barred from – and an ever eternal call to “let me in!” (a phrase mirrored throughout the text in character construction and setting) coupled with a bold incisive drive TOWARDS and not away from HATRED! Not only a medical narrative The Heights (Wuthering steadily towards closure) conjurs up beatic beauty and a series of fantastic ” end of life” scenarios to make any body dream of the after-life.
I will make his claim right now – all books/writings are about death – can you name anything that is not?
“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine…”
– Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Ch. 24
“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.”
– Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9
“A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.”
– Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
A mammoth novel of female adventure blended with dream-scapes and travel stories and female friendship – madness, marriage, social disgrace and a lament for new begiinings – and, there and then, as above – such pantheism – poetry in motion!
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity–but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and PERHAPS–(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)–PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
Steeped in hauntings that are threaded together in the imagination of the female protagonist The Yellow Wallpaper strips itself of any feeling of being a ghost story, but a ghost story it is! Haunted by malady and the self-realization that the female imagination is capable of seeing things outside of reality its protagonist central concern with madness uncovers the social and literary ideologies that contain the female writer.A superbly executed gothic nightmare – but for who?