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Loading... We Have Always Lived in the Castle (original 1962; edition 1984)by Shirley Jackson
Work InformationWe Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962)
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Yeeesh!! Creepy. ( ) Huh. Kogu aeg on olnud plaanis ja nüüd lõpuks sattus kätte. Väga. Hea. Lugu. Meenutas natuke "Herilase vabrikut" ja "Tüdrukut, kes armastas tuletikke", aga tegelikult ei ole sarnane. Ainuld see ... tunne, mingi õhkõrn vaib, millele ei ole võimalik kuidagi näppu peale panna. Lõpp oli natuke mehh, aga ainult juuksekarva võrra ja võtan süü selle pärast täiesti enda peale - kuna minu aju seostas loo millegipärast eelmainitud kahe raamatuga, siis säärast pööret nagu seal ei tule. Aga hea. Väga hea. I'm a big fan of authors who practice what they preach. The best horror writers from Poe to Lovecraft were, and I believe this is a medical term, totally bonkers. Shirley Jackson is an excellent example of someone whose fiction is enhanced because her peccadilloes leaked onto the page. Jackson's works frequently feature a "hysterical" woman who, despite the condescending and paternalistic reassurances of the men around her, is somehow better attuned to supernatural occurrences that may or may not exist. It is impossible not to read these scenes as drawn from her personal experience. She would of course be a worse author if she were simply writing fictional self-validations. But Jackson is also a master of ambiguity. The screaming woman says she saw a ghost; maybe she actually is crazy or maybe we are the guilty party for ignoring her. This ambiguity is what makes We Have Always Lived in the Castle so great. It is a book that features if not the king of all unreliable narrators than certainly the fairy princess of all unreliable narrators. It is difficult at first to decide whether Merricat's ramblings in the forest and playacting at being a witch are simply childish games or a symptom of something weirder. It is not initially clear that her whimsy masks something quite monstrous. The ambiguity covers everything. There's no denying that the Blackwoods are persecuted by their bigoted neighbors, but there's also no denying that the Blackwoods were once cruel and elitist and are now totally unhinged. It is evident that cousin Charles is an avaricious snake, and his attentions toward Constance and the Blackwood fortune are domineering and creepily pseudo-sexual. But he's not wrong when he castigates Merricat for her arrested development or Constance for her enabling passivity. The ending makes this a masterpiece. It is a fairy tale made real, a happily-ever-after that the heroines always desired and is therefore truly horrifying. There were always connotations of the Blackwoods as fearsome medieval lords: the house is a castle, their neighbors a village. But the ending transforms them into something even stranger: guardian spirits to be feared but also placated. The peasants give supplications to the white sisters in the ruin to ward off a curse. Merricat becomes the ghost she always wanted to be by a combination of collective trauma, superstition and dysfunction. Brilliant.
Of the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction ... none is more memorable than eighteen-year-old "Merricat" of Shirley Jackson's masterpiece of Gothic suspense We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inHas the adaptationDistinctionsNotable Lists
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. Penguin Australia2 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia. Editions: 0141191457, 0141194995 |