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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So I took a lot of lit classes in college where in we read nothing that wasn't 'literature' as narrowly defined as by being written by white men who didn't write 'genre' so I missed a lot of classics and this was one of them. On one hand I read through it easily enough, on the other I feel like it suffered in my mind from a nearly century long game of telephone. I was led to believe the unnamed narrator was being haunted by Maxim de Winter's first wife, the titular Rebecca ala something you would have seen in a Shirley Jackson novel (both du Maurier and Jackson were talked about in my classes we just weren't allowed to read them....)

It's not. In fact I'm not sure why this is billed most commonly as gothic suspense or romantic suspense (the latter broadly written across my version)

1. Gothic - okay it has the mansion overlooking the sea setting so maybe?
2. Romance - nope, don't see this at all She marries Max within 3 weeks and then they act as romantic and sexy as someone married for 50 years (or more often come off as daughter and father. She literally says this multiple times)
3. Suspense? Maybe but my version is 390 pages and nothing happens until about 260 pages in. I found it slow moving.

We meet her and Maxim in Monte Carlo as she's the young traveling companion of a middle aged woman (who eventually tells her this marriage is a bad idea) Literally they've known each other less than a month and she's about 18-19 and he's 40. We only know his wife has died but not how (not yet) when they hurriedly marry in a day.

When we get to Manderley we learn how wealthy he truly is (though in terms of suspense the opening line about dreaming of going to manderley again is nice foreshadowing. We know something happens) and we meet the servants, Frith and Robert who take care of the place, Frank who is the financial advisor and the malevolent Mrs. Danvers who honestly wasn't as horrible as I had been lead to believe (Yes, she's terrible but I expected her to be even more active and worse)

And then for the next 200 pages I'm there wanting to slap this girl into next week. The only thing haunting her is her own inferiority complex and she knows it. She says it. She's afraid of Danvers who she knows loved Rebecca more. She compares herself to a child all the time. She daydreams through tons of worse case scenarios, which okay, highly relatable but after a while you just want the story to get moving. It slows down SO much.

Her favorite words are 'I don't mind.' No lie, half her dialogue is her saying I don't mind while running daydreams about what she should have said. She is incredibly passive and without agency.

She doesn't come alive until Maxim shares his deep dark secret but only because something happens forcing him to. Okay yay she finally grows a backbone but her reason why is creepy as hell. And then the story rushes to the end. The pacing feels very off in this.

Max isn't much better. He's not as bad as Heathcliff is to Catherine. he just treats his wife like she's barely there, like she's an accessory and he has zero personality. His sister Beatrice has three times his personality (she's about the only character I liked)

So not only was I expecting more out of everyone but especially Danvers. Yes she's a sick bitch but really she only does two truly heinous things by mid book and one of them is passive aggressive. I will admit my own bias coming into this expecting ghostly signs of maybe Rebecca is still there (because that's how it was presented to me over the years) and then not getting that might have made me enjoy this less.

That said, I don't think it was bad by any means. Yes pacing issues and passive characters but we also need to remember this book is nearly 100 years old and it's still out there. Netflix is busy putting out Rebecca on the air waves. It is still relevant so read it yourself as your mileage will not be mine.



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Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sometimes, since we so often see Christie's work adapted to movies and tv shows we forget the time period when she wrote these was a deeply racist one. The movie/tv shows edit this out but when you read the book it tends to slap you in the face and you aren't expecting it. The anti-Italian sentiment in the first chapters made me set this aside (for years if I'm honest) and I only picked up again for a reading challenge.

Mr. Shaitana is an Italian man with theatrical presence, sort of a Mephistophelian presentation. He tells Poirot about a party he plans to host, a bridge game with four sleuths in one room and four potential murderers who got away with their crimes in the other and how he was going to one up Poirot and expose their crimes. Oddly enough everyone agrees to this (but only Poirot is in on that secrete I think, but maybe the other sleuths too)

So on the crime solving side we have Poirot, Inspector Battle of Scotland Yard, Secret Service Agent Colonel Race, mystery author Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, and on the potential murderer side there are Dr. Roberts, Mrs. Lorrimer, Major Despard, and Miss Anne Meredith. Shaitana sits out the game and by the end, he is dead with a dagger to the heart.

The sleuths all agree to pool their resources and help each other solve this crime, even allowing the amateur Ariadne to play along because she might be more trustworthy in the eyes of the other two women. In fact I loved that both Mrs. Lorrimer and Oliver are very capable women in no need of a man to help them (Anne less so but her friend Rhoda is a 'modern woman' in the parlance of the times and a fun character)

So we drop in to each detective's point of view (not so much Race's) and we follow along as they try to find the killer. Shaitana's reason to be dead seems almost as much to do with being a swarthy, shifty Italian (you know how they are with women, wink wink, nod nod) as it is the fact someone fears being exposed as a murderer.

Was Shaitana right? Did Dr Roberts kill a patient? Did Despard murder a man in the Amazon? Did Lorrimer take out her husband? Did meek little Anne kill a few along the way? All interesting questions and Christie keeps you bouncing back and forth between the four. All had good reasons to jab a knife into Shaitana's heart.

All and in all a good mystery with plenty of fun twists (and oh the other bits of racism which at the end of the day were only a few lines, dark skinned people were seen as untrustworthy by some of the characters (Africans and Indian) and oddly there's a line about of course he's not a killer, he's white, strange for anyone to believe/say that especially since almost all of Christie's killers are).



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The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I was surprised to see how modern this felt. I've seen multiple movies without knowing which book they were drawing from (as this is a series) . I might have gone higher on the rating except for two things, the time period related misogyny (granted at the time of publication in 1905 this would have been a feminist text as this is Marguerite Blakeney's tale much more than the titular pimpernel) and I could have lived with the 'cleverist woman in France/England turning into a 'child' when needed. I was thinking hey we're doing pretty well on time period related racism (mostly because it's all White aristocrats) and then in the end starting with a chapter called The Jew it slams headlong into anti-semitism. More on that later.

So it's 1792 and Madame Guillotine is taking heads off left and right. Anyone with money is primed to be headless and anyone even thinking about disobeying the Republic can go too (including NOT catching the Scarlet Pimpernel). So SP has become a bogeyman to the Republic. He's been sneaking French Aristos out to England to safety.

Marguerite is now living in England in safety with her husband Percy while her brother is still in France. Armand and Marguerite were in favor of the Republic (as they were not aristos) until it started going too far. Armand is helping SP out and Marguerite has a bit of a guilty conscience because she accidentally betrayed a friend's father leading to his death. She tries to make the best of it having armor in the form of friendship with the Prince of Wales.

She and Percy have fallen out over this however and the man who adored her has gone ice cold just weeks after their marriage when this comes to light. Naturally with Armand in France helping out the SP and Chauvelin, one of the higher ups who can't wait to guillotine the people he feels deserves it, leverages Marguerite, use her position to sniff out the SP or her brother's head rolls.

She complies until she realizes who SP is and now she's trapped so she goes to France to save both SP and Armand and....goes from this level of brave to a total twit in time to get captured and needs SP to rescue her too. Eye roll (it had been doing SO well too for a 120 year old book until then).

And I'm back to the anti-semitism and it is BAD. Literally SP's entire plan to get out of the trap Chauvelin has laid depends on the fact that all the French hate Jews and he's going to use that against him (ouch). Sure enough our villain Chauvelin is totally an anti-semite and we get all the worst negative stereotypes about Jews (especially how greasy and gross they appear and how they can't resist a bargain).

So I enjoyed this up until the last handful of chapters when the heroine goes stupid and all of France hates Jews. Sigh.



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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


What can you say? We all know this story but this is the first time I've read it. I have finally found the holy grail of movie adaptations: it follows the book! Friends in the biz have always said novellas/short stories are the easiest thing to adapt and this proves it. Most shows I've seen (George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart) are nearly word for word. How refreshing.

I was also thinking for its time, it made very good points, ones that would have people screaming about nowadays. Giving to the poor? Helping others? We've always needed those reminders which is in a way a shame but Dickens crafted a way of showing why having a giving heart is so important and will continue to do so long after me.



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