Category Archives: Fiction

Mary Higgins Clark: Voices in the Coalbin (1989) A Ghost Story

Posted in Books, Fiction, Ghost Story, Short Story by

This is not on my R.I.P. list but it suits just fine and I am in the mood to stray from the path. I felt like reading some Mary Higgins Clark after having visited The Book Whisperers’ Blog the other day. I remembered that I had a collection of her short stories (in German Träum süss, kleine Schwester). They  don’t exist in this combination in English but that does not matter as I think there are only two very goods ones in it and those are available as Audio Book. However That’s the Ticket does not classify for an entry in R.I.P. as it is neither fish nor fowl. No ghost story, no mystery, but it is OK.

Voices in the Coalbin is also in The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Ghost Stories (Danielle from A Work In Progress has reviewed some of them and will go on reviewing more for R.I.P.) as it is really an eery story, something  I did not expect from Mary Higgins Clark. It has all we like in her writing, great descriptions, detail, atmosphere. And it is spooky. It tells the story of a young couple, Mike and Laurie, who drive to a weekend house in the country that belonged to Mike’s grandmother. The trip is meant to help Laurie to recover from nightmares, depression and phobias. She has been seeing a psychiatrist who warned the husband to be very careful as she is fragile. She seems to be on the brink of remembering things that are linked to her own grandmother who mistreated and abused her emotionally as a child.  When they arrive at the holiday house  nothing is like he remembered it. It’s rather bleak and sad. When something happens that reminds Laurie of her childhood, she panics and then disappears. I am not revealing anything more. I already said it, it is not a mystery, it is really a ghost story and the end was creepy.

I loved to read it, cuddled up in bed, both cats close by and sipping a cup of tea. It is already quite cool over here, crows are sitting in the trees in front of the window and their cries sound already much more eery and lonelier than in summer…

E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Sandman aka Der Sandmann (1816)

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The Sandman was the short story I read for this years R.I.P. challenge.

Much has been said about E.T.A.Hofmann’s The Sandman. Interpretations abound. Even Sigmund Freud used this story to illustrate some of his theories. Hoffmann was part of the so-called dark romanticism that explored the uncanny in all its forms. Be it as it may, for me this is and will always be one of the spookiest stories I have ever read. I remember that it haunted me quite  a bit when I read it for the first time years ago but I did not expect it to have the same effect after all these years. But it did.

It is a mysterious story, many interpretations are possible. Nathanael lives away from his beloved and his family in a student town when, one afternoon, he sees a person who reminds him of someone who visited their father when he was a child. These memories are very dark and scary. Whenever the old man, Coppelius, appeared the children had to go to bed as fast as they could. They were told that the Sandman was coming and that he was after their eyes. Nathanael being the most curious of the children sneaked into the study of his father one night and hid behind the curtains. Unfortunately he got caught and what followed shocked him so much that he came down with a fever that lasted for weeks. Shortly after this evening Coppelius came one last time during which they all of a sudden heard a big bang from the father’s study. Upon entering the family finds him dead, with a completely blackened face.

It is this very Coppelius that Nathanael believes to have seen. Once again he feels the same terror as in his childhood. I do not want to further spoil this story. It does get scarier and darker from then on. We never really know if these things happen or if Nathanael has gone mad. Is Coppelius the devil? Did he and Nathanael’s father do some alchemical experiments? There are a lot of mysterious elements the strangest of which is Nathanael’s falling in love with Olympia who doesn’t seem human.

Hoffmann has written quite a lot. Novels and short stories. Many are very famous and were influential. The Sandman is the most famous of his stories. In Jacques Offenbach’s opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, one part is dedicated to The Sandman. There is also a movie based on the opera including many ballet scenes. I attached a video for those who like opera or ballet.

Hoffmann who was very talented at drawing illustrated some of his tales, as you can see above.

You can find a link to the story here, if you would like to read it.

Katherine Pancol: Un homme à distance (2001) An Epistolary Novel about Books

Posted in Books, Epistolary Novel, Fiction, Novel by

This little book, Un homme à distance, only 160 pages long, is a real gem. I was so enchanted by it. In the evenings I could hardly wait to get back from work and go on reading. Why it has not been translated is a total mystery to me as it would find a multitude of readers in the English-speaking world.  It is also surprising since Katherine Pancol lived in the States where she took creative writing courses at the Columbia University. It is a novel in letters and a novel about books that has been compared to 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. We find the same passion for books, the same enchantment. The story is quite simple. A young woman, owner of a book shop in Fécamp (a fishing port with an attractive seafront promenade located between Le Havre and Dieppe, in the French Normandy region), starts a correspondence with a mysterious man. They exchange their thoughts on all sorts of books, some I had never heard of before but, as a true addict, had to buy immediately since I knew the others and they are all outstanding.

The tone of this novel is quite melancholic. The young shopkeeper is heartbroken about the end of an affair which makes her live like a recluse. This correspondence brings her back to life. The end stunned me. It was not what I had expected.

Let’s hope  she will be translated or that the one or the other reader of this post does read  French.

As many of the books mentioned are absolute favourites of mine and the others seem to be must-reads too and for all those who are curious, I made a list.

Contrary to Pancol’s books they are all available as translations.

The Great Meaulnes or The Lost Estate by Henri Alan-Fournier. The Princess de Clèves by Mme de Lafayette. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids  Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. Three Horses by Erri de Luca

Bakunin’s Son by Sergio d’Atzeni. The House of Others by Silvio d’Arzo. What Maisie Knew by Henry James

Les liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan  Zweig. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun.

Cousin Bette by Balzac. Les Diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly. Doomed Love Camilo Castelo Branco. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert.

A Selection of the Chroniques by Guy de Maupassant. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Sonnets from the Portuguese by  Elizabeth Browning. The Journal of Delacroix

The only one that has not been translated is Confidence africaine by Roger Martin du Gard.

One that would need to be rediscovered is The Lost Estate. It is probably the novel that influenced Fitzgerald in writing The Great Gatsby. But, as stated before, all the books on this list are excellent and remarkable.

Katherine Pancol has written quite a lot of books. They have all been very successful in France, even more so than this one. The most notable seem to be Les yeux jaunes des crocodiles, La valse lente des tortues and Les écureuils du Central Park sont triste le lundi.

You can visit Katherine´s French/English Homepage.

Lauren Groff: The Monsters of Templeton (2008)

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This is quite an unusual, hybrid book. There were passages I enjoyed a lot. The atmosphere and description of Templeton were something to savour. The idea of a monster living in the lake and the ghost in Willie’s bedroom appealed to me a great deal as well. But as much as I loved the beginning and many later parts I lost patience at times. My biggest problem was that I found it too exuberant and too artificial. It is full of great descriptions but totally lacks any psychological depth. The characters, Willie, her mother Vi, Cassandra and many others are charming but they are two-dimensional. Still I can understand that this book found his ardent fans.

At the beginning we see Willie depressed and sad. She is pregnant from her affair with her professor and comes back to Templeton where she grew up looking for refuge. She considers this to be a total failure. She has left Templeton for San Francisco a few years back. Templeton, as we read in the foreword, is actually Cooperstown, Groff’s hometown. It is also the hometown of James Fenimore Cooper. A small town with all the charm of a small town. While away in California Lauren Groff was so homesick that she decided to write about her town.

Apart from being pregnant and desperate, Willie hears from her mother,  that she is actually the daughter of someone from Templeton. After having thought she was the offspring of her mother’s casual encounters with different men during her hippie days, this comes as quite a shock. Willie being an archeologist and trained in research takes this bit of information as a challenge. She starts to investigate the story of her illustrious family, descendants of the great Marmaduke Temple (aka James Fenimore Cooper) in order to find out who her father is. She knows that one of the men in her genealogical tree is illegitimate and this information will lead her to her father.

The story of Willie is interspersed with journal entries, letters, diaries, stories of her ancestors. They are quite different in tone, some are like short stories in their own right and seem to have been written in another century, some were, for me, just tiresome diversions.

In the end, Willie knows the name of her father. She has learnt a great deal about her family and her town. The weak and depressed Willie of the beginning is strong again and able to go out into the world where a brilliant future is waiting for her.

This book deals with some heavy and important themes like illegitimacy / legitimacy / roots /origins /  parenthood/ history. In the beginning there are a lot of  signs of the insecurity of the times we live in but throughout the novel this is more and more abandoned. It is as if the author wanted to say: When you know your origins and where you belong you can never get lost and nothing can really harm you. I am not sure I agree with this.

Be it as it may, this is an original book and some parts are memorable. It’s just somewhat flawed as  a whole.

I would really like to do Lauren Groff justice so maybe I should let her speak for herself:

Carson McCullers: The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

Posted in Books, Fiction, Novella by
I remember reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter years ago. What a special book but quite sad. All these people confessing to someone who is mute. I was very touched. Right after I also read The Ballad of the Sad Café which I have finally read again.
Carson McCullers was such a gifted writer. The way she tells this story of friendship, love and betrayal is so full of foreboding. Melancholic and gloomy at the same time. But also nostalgic. The narrator whose presence is very strong leaves no doubt as to the outcome of this story.  The title already gives away the tone, since ballads are not often joyful and one about a sad café is even less likely to be so.
Miss Amelia, the central character, is very unusual. She takes pride in things that are normally rather attributed to men like great physical strength. She can fight a man with her bare fists and often she will win. She is also a cunning  business woman and a healer. And an introvert who lives a lonely life on her own, although, as we are told, there was a ten-day marriage once. The setting, a small town in the rural South in the  forties of the last century, is described with a lot of detail. We are drawn into the story right away. We see, feel, hear and smell the place. We see the people sit together on the porch during the hot summer nights and sipping their drinks. I always idolized the South and the literature about it with its Gothic feel that can even be found in a lighthearted book like To Kill a Mockingbird. In this much gloomier tale the setting seems to have a life of its own.
If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do. The largest building, in the very centre of the town, is boarded up completely and leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute. The house is very old. There is about it a curious, cracked look that is very puzzling until you suddenly realize that at one time, and long ago, the right side of the front porch had been painted, and part of the wall—but the painting was left unfinished and one portion of the house is darker and dingier than the other. The building looks completely deserted. Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town . . .However, here in this very town there was once a café. And this old boarded-up house was unlike any other place for many miles around. There were tables with cloths and paper napkins, coloured streamers from the electric fans, great gatherings on Saturday night. The owner of the place was Miss Amelia Evans. But the person most responsible for the success and gaiety of the place was a hunchback called Cousin Lymon. One other person had a part in the story of this café—he was the former husband of Miss Amelia, a terrible character who returned to the town after a long term in the penitentiary, caused ruin, and then went on his way again. The café has long since been closed, but it is still remembered.

The slow pace of the story changes when the hunchback arrives and pretends to be Amelia’s cousin Lymon. What unfolds is as incredible as touching. Amelia, who is no beauty,  falls in love with this being than seems to be even less fortunate than herself. With the influence of the chatty, lively cousin, her store turns into a café that soon becomes the center of this small town in lack of amusement.
We know from the beginning that the cheerfulness will end. When her ex-husband who was in the penitentiary for robbery reappears, he is announced like an evil spirit.
The cousin soon associates with this man whom he must have known before.
The ending is one of the saddest ever. I remember that I was really shaken by it the first time I read it.
I never knew much about Carson Mc Cullers but recently found out that apart from being a prodigy writer she led quite a sad life. She suffered from strokes, one of which left her paralyzed on the left side, since an early age. She had a tumultuous marriage, got divorced but married the same man again. She attempted suicide and he eventually committed suicide. As we know, she died at a relatively young age, leaving us her wonderful books that are so rich in unusual characters and  haunting intense atmosphere.
I know there is a Merchant Ivory film of this story. I would quite like to see it.