Diane Setterfield 2006
An engrossing tale of mysterious twins Adeline and Emmeline in the words of Vida Winter, a famous author who has summoned Margaret Lea to write her last biography, the true version. The book's plot is elaborate and gothic, an intricate web of many sub-plots that satisfies and captivates.
"You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying over vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it."
"My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? ... What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie."
"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they piece your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."
"And everyday I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs?"
"All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a stroy. And nothing is more telling than a story."
"It was morning. I had read the night away. There was no thirteenth tale."
"I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings... Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels."
"When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And so during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again --the lost joys of reading returned to me."
"What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?"
"Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them."
"I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel."
"Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole."
"Anyway, the minute I got here I knew. This is home, I said to myself. This is where I come from. There was no doubt about it. I knew."
"Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I have been ashamed to say so."
"Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes--characters even--caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you."
"I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course."
There can be no secrets in a house where there are children.
Personal Note: The ocean was calling me, but I had to finish the book: Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, summer 2008.
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