The Content Reader

Having read a while ago The Turn of the Screw and lately, What Maisie Knew and (for the second time) The Aspern Papers , Henry James is popping up as one of my favourite authors. He is never an easy read. Well, easy enough to read, but his novels always end in a state of: WHAT! What does he mean? Why don’t we get any answers? It is really amazing. A while ago I saw a movie based on his What Maisie Knew which I really liked. It was put in a modern setting, but I thought that the end would be more or less in line with James’ novel. So I was reading and reading, amazed over the characters that appears in the novel. Are any of them really sane? Some do seem so, but as mentioned above, James does not want to make it easy for us. Reading on, getting closer to the end, I was just expecting the rather happy ending that I had seen in the film. I was up for a surprise! The ending was neither happy nor unhappy, and definitely not as in the film. And then again, James leaves us with a qu...

Some years ago I read Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and I absolutely loved it. Wonderfully written, wonderful out of the ordinary people. When I saw that he followed up this book with a book about Venice,  The City of Fallen Angels , I bought it and it has decorated by TBR shelves ever since. Finally, I grabbed it and started reading. As with his other book you are drawn in to the history of the city. He manages to find all these interesting people that he contacts to get their story. As with the Midnight book, the main story is a legal one. The opera house in Venice burnt down while it was renovated. Now they are searching for the people responsible, either by arson or by accident. This leads us into the thorny area of Italian law, where for a foreigner, once your inside, there seems to be no way out!