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...

A while ago I read Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, which I like very much. So it was with great anticipation, I grabbed another of her books The Fearful Symmetry . Some years ago I read an interview with her, where she was talking about the story of this book. It seemed fascinating, so at a time, I bought it. So, as you see, these two books have graced my TBR shelves for some time, but not anymore! The Fearful Symmetry is a very ‘illusive’ story that lingers on the border between life and death. Julia and Valentina Poole are twins and, as usual with twins, they are doing everything together. One day they receive a letter from an English lawyer stating that their aunt Elspeth Noblin has left them her flat, overlooking Highgate cemetery. There is only one condition of the inheritance; their mother is not allowed to cross the threshold. At this point they did not even know they had an aunt. Their mother is reluctant to speak about her and for the twins it is quite a myst...