Tag Archives: A Post a Day in May

Love by Angela Carter – A Post A Day in May

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Opening an Angela Carter novel is like entering an opulent, sumptuously decorated room. It’s lush, it’s whimsical, it’s anything but minimalist. Love is no exception; it might even be one of the lusher ones I’ve read. Heroes & Villains has always been my favourite because of the imagery. Love has similar elements. The landscape, the apartment, the people, they are a bit wild, a bit mad, and reflect Angela Carter’s very distinct aesthetic. The book also reminded me of one of Le Douanier Rousseau’s paintings. He used to be my favourite painter as a child.

Love tells the story of a relationship triangle. One could call it a love triangle but whether there really is love among these three people, even though the title might indicate so, is questionable.

Annabel is a fragile, anxious art student who lives in her mind. Everything she sees is fed into her own mythology. Things have value only as far as they somehow fit into this mythology.

She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.

Lee, a former literature student and now teacher, is very different. He drifts through life, attracting women with his good looks and dazzling smile. His brother Buzz is more like Annabel. Slightly crazy, definitely wild, delinquent, and unpredictable.

At the beginning of this short novel, Lee and Buzz live together. They are only half-brothers and don’t have a lot in common except for a troubled childhood, but they are close or rather dependent on each other. One morning, after a party, Lee wakes up and a girl he doesn’t know lies next to him. How Annabel landed there, is explained later. This scene shows, they didn’t really choose each other. Fate brought them together. Annabel moves in with Lee. Buzz is travelling at that time, but once he comes back, dynamics change and the relationship becomes problematic.

Before Annabel moves in, Lee lives in white rooms. Her arrival brings colour and disorder. Because she’s an art student, and loves colour, she will soon cover his walls with paintings (see quote at the end of the post).

They rolled all over the pastel crayons scattered on the sheets so her back was variegated with patches and blotches all the colours of the rainbow and Lee was also marked everywhere with brilliant dusts, both here and there also darkly spotted with blood, each a canvas involuntarily patterned by those workings of random chance so much prized by the surrealists.

This is a rich tale of complicated relationships with destructive and self-destructive facets. Upon reading the names Annabel and Lee, anyone who knows Edgar Allan Poe, will immediately think of his poem Annabel Lee. That’s not a coincidence. If you know it, you know this is a tragic story. (You can read the poem here)

Annabel is so frail that a man like Lee, who carelessly drifts through life, seducing one woman after the other, unhinges her. And the friendship with someone like Buzz, who is as unconventional as they come, makes things even worse.

I loved this book so much. It’s one of a few books by her that I hadn’t read when I went through my Angela Carter phase. I’m not sure why. Possibly because of the title. I didn’t expect it to be this good. Reading it was like watching a very trippy movie or exploring a house with rooms that are all decorated in another, but very luxurious way. It’s also fascinating as a character study.

Love has so many symbols, themes, and images that fans of Angela Carter wil recognise from her other novels: rich interiors, leafy nature, passion, mental health, suicide, female sexuality, bourgeoisie, bohème, marriage, free love . . . I could go on and on.

I’m afraid, I’m not doing this complex book any justice. It would deserve an in-depth review but, because of my project, I don’t have the time to go deeper.

Angela Carter wrote an Afterword to Love, in which she imagines the future of her characters. It’s a feminist sequel to Love. Style-wise it was different from the novel, more sarcastic and cheeky.

I’ll leave you with a favourite passage from the beginning of the book (p.7)

In their room, Lee lay face down on the carpet in front of the fire, perhaps asleep. The walls around him were painted a very dark green and from this background emerged all the dreary paraphernalia of romanticism, landscapes of forests, jungles and ruins inhabited by gorillas, trees with breasts, winged men with pig faces and women whose heads were skulls. An enormous bedstead of dull since rarely polished brass, spread with figured Indian cotton, occupied the center of the room which was large and high but so full of bulky furniture in dark woods (chairs, sofas, bookcases, sideboards, a round mahogany table covered with a fringed, red plush cloth, a screen cover with time browned snaps) that one had to move around the room very carefully for fear of tripping over things. Heavy velvet curtains hung at the windows and puffed blue dust at the touch; a light powder of dust covered everything. On the mantelpiece stood the skull of a horse amongst a clutter of small objects such as clockwork toys, stones of many shapes and various bottles and jars.

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy – Classic Russian Literature – A Post a Day in May

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Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych was published in 1886, roughly thirty years after War and Peace and twenty years after Anna Karenina.

I have read this before but felt it was time to reread it. I didn’t realize when starting it, what an excellent companion piece to Flaubert’s A Simple Heart this is. Both novellas tell the story of a life. One the story of a simple, uneducated woman, the other the story of a highly educated, successful man. Both stories are tragic.

The Death of Ivan Ilych starts with the discussion of a few lawyers, one of which just read their colleague, Ivan Ilych, has died. This intro chapter sets the tone. The reaction of the men tells us everything about them, their way of life, and Ivan Ilych’s life. Not one of them is saddened. They are only upset because it briefly reminds them of death. They soon console themselves though.

The very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died, and they hadn’t.

Only one of the men feels he should pay the widow a visit. Seeing the dead man makes him feel uncomfortable. He’s glad when he can escape again and go back to his life, his “friends” and playing bridge, a game Ivan Ilych had enjoyed and been very good at.

After this intro chapter follows the story of Ilych’s life. This is how it begins:

Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

This is so short and cruel and tells us in one sentence everything that we need to know about Ivan Ilych. It condenses what we will read in the next chapters in more detail.

Ivan Ilych was a successful lawyer. He made a stunning career, even though he wasn’t always happy with the developments, especially not after he got married. What at first looked like a good idea, settling down with someone who had a bit of money and was nice to look at, soon proved to have been a mistake. She was jealous and never happy with what they had, always pushing him to make more and more money. He did so, not only for her and domestic peace, but because he, too, measured success in terms of financial and professional success. And he also liked power.

In his work itself, especially in his examinations, he very soon acquired a method of eliminating all considerations irrelevant to the legal aspect of the case, and reducing even the most complicated case to a form in which it would be presented on paper only in its externals, completely excluding his personal opinion of the matter, while above all observing every prescribed formality.

After living in provincial towns for many years, he finally gets offered a very good position in St Petersburg. He buys a house and furnishes it the way he always wanted. In his eyes it is perfection. But the author tells us otherwise.

In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there are damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes — all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class. His house was so like the others that it would never have been noticed, but to him it all seemed to be quite exceptional.

Ivan Ilych, who has never done any manual thing in his life, enjoys decorating his new home but then something happens. He has a minor accident and feels some pain in his side.

Soon after this, he notices that the pain won’t go and that he has other symptoms. He knows he’s seriously ill, even fears he might die.

Over the next months, Ivan Ilych deteriorates more and more, is misdiagnosed and misunderstood and dies a lonely painful death.

Ilych’s illness and death are slow and agonizing and give him time to think about his life. He realizes that something had been missing, that he had measured success in the wrong way.

‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?’ he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.

The tragedy is that the doctors who are incapable of empathy, are just like he was with the criminals— pompous and condescending. His entire world, he discovers is full of falsehood.

What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he only needs keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.

The Death of Ivan Ilych is an upsetting story. It’s dreadful to see how much he suffers and how nobody cares. I think one can also feel that Tolstoy didn’t like his character and that might be the biggest difference to Flaubert’s story. Flaubert didn’t judge Felicité. He felt compassion. Tolstoy doesnt feel compassion for Ilych as he seems to stand for everything Tolstoy abhors – bureaucracy, nepotism and arrivistes.

As I mentioned before, I read this twice and it feels like I’ve been reading two different stories just because my own life has changed so much. The first time, I’ve read it right after my dad’s death. This time around the sections on illness got to me more because the doctor’s reminded me so much of some of the doctor’s I’ve seen in the last couple of months. They just didn’t listen and had their idea about why I was in pain but very clearly they were wrong.

A lot has been speculated about Ivan Ilych’s illness. It’s never said what he has and might not be important. There are also many theories about the meaning of this story. To me, it is the story of a man who wanted only pleasant things in life, who hated change, and let himself drift until he hit a major obstacle, which he was incapable of overcoming. In that, and verything else, he is indeed mediocre.

100 Must-Read Life-Changing Books by Nick Rennison – Bloomsbury Reading Guide – A Post a Day in May

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I’m very fond of these little Bloomsbury Reading Guides. I say little because they are just a bit bigger than a hand. I own quite a few of them. I find them well-done, informative, and a good introduction to different kinds of books and genres.

Now “life-changing” might make a few people roll their eyes thinking this is about self-help books. But it’s not. It’s about books that have had a major impact on people’s lives for various reasons. Either because they were ground-breaking, or because the author wrote about something in a new way. Because they talk about social injustice, philosophy, or psychological ideas. Many are novels that were highly influential. Some of these books literally changed a lot of people’s lives. Because they made them see the world in a new way or understand things better. In his introduction, Nick Rennison writes that this isn’t meant to be a best of. Just a varied list.

The idea that there can be a definitive list of the books most likely to change lives, and change them for the better, is a ludicrous one. Books can change lives but they do so in a wide variety of often subtle ways. Very different books can, in different ways, be life-changing and the selection of titles in this book reflects that. 100 Must-Read Life-Changing Books finds space for, amongst others, a children’s novel about a young girl who discovers a key to a secret garden, a Chinese text on a war from the sixth century BC, a black comedy set in WWII, the autobiography of one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable statesmen, a handbook on happiness by one of the world’s great religious leaders and a fable about a pilot who meets a story-telling child in the Sahara desert.

The authors and their book are presented in alphabetical order. Author and book are then presented in a short bio, summary and history of the influence of the book. These chapters are followed by Read on lists, which either contain other books by the author or books by other authors that are similar.

Throughout the book you can find themed boxes with lists of books.

Here are some of the authors you can find in this book – I’m picking two for every letter:

Isabel Allende, Marcus Aurelius, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Albert Camus, Jung Chang, Dalai Lama, Simone de Beauvoir, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, Ghandi, Jean Giono, Stephen Hawking, Hermann Hesse, C.G. Jung, Helen Keller, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Lee, Primo Levi, Nelson Mandela, Alice Miller, Friedrich Nietzsche, Boris Pasternak, Sylvia Plath, Sogyal Rinpoche, J.K Rowling, J. D. Salinger, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Henry David Thoreau, Sun Tzu, Kurt Vonnegut, Edmund White, Naomi Wolf, Paramahansa Yogananda

As for the books – you’ll find titles as varied as The Little Prince, Siddharta, The Origin of Species, Walden, The Beauty Myth, A Room of One’s Own, Life of Pi, The Outsiders, On the Road, The Art of War and many more.

Because I have already read many of the books that are mentioned here, I like to use it as a refresher or when I’m in the mood to read books on a theme or books that might be similar.

If this kind of book appeals to you – here is a link to an older post about the Bloomsbury Guide on Historical Novels. It’s excellent as well.

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst – Belgian Novella – A Post a Day in May

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Dimitri Verhulst is a Belgian writer who writes in Flemish. He has written poetry, short stories, and novels. His novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill – Mevrouw Verona daalt de heuvel af was first published in Belgium in 2006. The translation is from 2009. In the book it says it was translated from the Dutch but that is inaccurate as he writes Flemish. The two languages are similar but not interchangeable.

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill is a love story, or, to be more precise, a story about a love that goes on long after the beloved has died.

Mme Verona and her composer husband Monsieur Potter moved to a small village in Belgium. Their house is high up on a hill far away from other people, surrounded by a vast forest. Sadly, Mme Verona’s husband gets very ill and dies. Most reviews go into more details about his death, but I will refrain from that as it is a major spoiler.

Mme Verona is very beautiful and since there are almost only men in the village, they all hope she might come down and possibly choose a new mate. But she never does. She continues her life pretty much as if her husband were still alive. Of course, she misses him. But he is everywhere.

When she looked out the window at the valley, she looked with him. That was partly why she never urged visitors to stay for dinner, preferring the intimacy of the idea and feeling of dining alone with her husband. Just the two of them, and a bottle that proceeded towards its original emptiness half as fast as before.

Monsieur Potter knew he was dying and, as a last act of love, he cut down enough trees to assure his wife had enough firewood until she would eventually die as well.

In memory of her husband Madame has a tree cut down. She wants a cello made from its wood. The man who cuts down the tree, isn’t the one who will make the instrument as it takes twenty years for the wood to be ready for use.

At the beginning of the book, Mme Verona and her dog get ready to go down to the village. She knows that it will be the last time she goes there. Before she leaves, she muses that if she was asked at the gates of heaven what her one striking characteristic was, she would say that dogs always sought out her company. Just like they always sought out her husband’s company. That’s why they always had dogs or were followed by dogs. If it had been possible, they would have adopted every stray they encountered.

I liked the beginning of the novella very much. The writing is very distinct, very unusual. A mix between sarcasm, wit, empathy, and even lyricism. I expected a story about Mme Verona, but after the initial pages, the story moves away from her and we are introduced to the village and its eccentric inhabitants. We’re told funny anecdotes like the one where a cow becomes mayor for one year or those involving the vet who is also the GP for the village. As amusing as this was, I had to finish the book to fully understand its structure. It’s one of those circular stories that end where they start and only become a whole once you’ve finished it.

I’ll leave you with a few quotes that illustrate Verhulst’s style and humour.

But even when he wasn’t working, Monsieur Potter enjoyed being here, seeing the aureoles force their way down through the foliage and listening to the rustling wind, either alone or with Madame Verona, and sliding downhill with her on a sled, the winters telling him that lovers were children, trying to reach back into the past to seize the time they hadn’t spent together. Wanting to have shared their entire lives with each other, because love refused to settle for less.

About the dog looking forward to a walk:

The prospect of finally being able to empty his shrunken bladder on posts, letterboxes and car wheels elicited his most charming bark and would have him ramming his mistress’s legs with joy except that he realised she was too old for that kind of doggery, and that it would most likely lead to his having the implantation of a plastic hip on his conscience.

Madame Verona is a charming story of love that survives death. It’s ideal for those readers who like sophisticated, quirky writing and long, complex sentences.

The Poetry of Billy Collins – Billy Collins Teaches Reading and Writing Poetry – A Post a Day in May

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Some of you know that I have an all-year pass to Masterclass, which means I can take any class I want without any restrictions. I’m also immediately informed when new classes are added. Over the last few years, I have taken several of these classes and enjoyed them a great deal. I say “have taken” but mostly, I watch the lesson videos and read the workbook. I haven’t decided yet to which one I’d like to fully commit, meaning doing the exercises and possibly submitting them and engage in a discussion with fellow writers. When you actively take the classes, you have the chance of receiving feedback from the teacher. This chance is especially high when a new class is uploaded.

Masterclass offers a wide range of classes for a very reasonable price. Some are writing classes, but not all of them. I’ll probably write another, more detailed post this month to tell you about some of the great content I discovered.

Last year, many new writing classes were uploaded, one of which was the course Reading and Writing Poetry by Billy Collins. Billy Collins was the poet laureate of the U.S. from 2001-2003 and the poet laureate of New York State from 2004 and 2006. I must admit, I wasn’t familiar with him but started the course out of curiosity and was immediately smitten. He’s such a lovely person and the way he teaches is very engaging and inspiring. You can see some of that in the intro I attached below.

In the course he reads many of his poems, explains the way he works, where to find inspiration. But he also talks about other poets and their work, since the course isn’t only about writing but also about reading poetry.

Discovering his poems was a joy. I like how so many of them have very mundane themes but with a surprising twist.

One of the poems he analyses is his own Elk Water Falls. Since this was my introduction to his poetry, I’m sharing it here.

Elk Water Falls

is where the Elk River falls
from a rocky and considerable height,
turning pale with trepidation at the lip
(it seemed from where I stood below)
before it is unbuckled from itself
and plummets, shredded, through the air
into the shadows of a frigid pool,
so calm around the edges, a place
for water to recover from the shock
of falling apart and coming back together
before it picks up its song again,
goes sliding around the massive rocks
and past some islands overgrown with weeds
then flattens out and slips around a bend
and continues on its winding course,
according to this camper’s guide,
then joins the Clearwater at its northern fork,
which must in time find the sea
where this and every other stream
mistakes the monster for itself,
sings its name one final time
then feels the sudden sting of salt.

Another one he speaks of in the course is this:

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

And here’s another one I like a lot:

Central Park

It’s hard to describe how that day in the park
was altered when I stopped to read
an official sign I came across near the great carousel,
my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Ambrose.

As the carousel turned in the background,
all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses
rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope,
I was learning how the huge thing
was first designed to be powered
by a blind mule, as it turned out,
strapped to the oar of a wheel in an earthen
room directly below the merry turning of the carousel.

The sky did not darken with this news
nor did a general silence fall on the strollers
or the ball players on the green fields.
No one even paused to look my way,
though I must have looked terrible
as I stood there filling with sympathy
not so much for the harnessed beast
tediously making its rounds,
but instead of the blind mule within me
always circling in the dark —
the mule who makes me turn when my name is called
or causes me to nod with a wooden gaze
or sit doing nothing on a bench in the shape of a swan.

Somewhere, there must still be a door
to that underground room,
the lock rusted shut, the iron key misplaced,
last year’s leaves piled up against the sill,
and inside, a trance of straw on the floor,
a whiff of manure, and maybe a forgotten bit
or a bridle hanging from a hook in the dark.

Poor blind beast, I sang softly as I left the park.
poor blind me, poor blind earth turning blindly on its side.

The Billy Collins collection I’ve got, Aimless Love – New and Selected Poems contains poems taken from four collections and about fifty new ones. All the poems I quoted here, can be found in Aimless Love.

I like the narrative quality of his poetry and that he takes something very mundane for his beginnings and then often moves to a bigger thought. The poem A Boy Shooting at a Statue is an excellent example for this.

Boy Shootig at a Statue

 

It was late afternoon,

the beginning of winter, a light snow,

and I was the only one in the small park

 

to witness the lone boy running

in circles around the base of a bronze statue.

I could not read the carved name

 

of the statesman who loomed above,

one hand on his cold hip,

but as the boy ran, head down

 

he would point a finger at the statue

and pull an imaginary trigger

imitating the sounds of rapid gunfire.

 

Evening thickened, the mercury sank,

but the boy kept running in the circle

of his footprints in the snow

 

shooting blindly into the air.

History will never find a way to end,

I thought, as I left the park by the north gate

 

and walked slowly home

returning to the station of my desk

where the sheets of paper I wrote on

 

were like pieces of glass

through which I could see

hundreds of dark birds circling in the sky below.

 

Maybe, unlike me, you already knew Billy Collins. If not, I hope I made you discover a new poet that you will like as much as I did. And maybe you’re even tempted to take his Masterclass.

 

 

Killer in The Rain by Raymond Chandler – Precursor of The Big Sleep – A Post a Day in May

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The novelette Killer in the Rain is one of the later short works of Raymond Chandler. He reused some of the elements with great effect in his first novel The Big Sleep.

As a teenager and early teen, I read all of Chandlers novels and loved them very much. Whenever someone asked me who my favourite writer was, I didn’t need to think twice – Chandler. As much as I loved him, I didn’t return to him because I rarely reread books. So, a few years back, someone asked me the question again and I said “It used to be Chandler”. That made it sound as if I didn’t like him anymore, but that wasn’t what I meant, it just meant – it’s been so long, I can’t be sure anymore. While I read and loved all of his novels, I hardly read any of his short stories and novellas, so it was with a lot of trepidation, that I started Killer in the Rain. What an experience this was. This isn’t as good as any of the novels, but it already has all the trademarks and reminded me why he once was my favourite author. Next time someone will ask me the question again, the answer will be – Chandler. And not in past tense, no.

Killer in the Rain is set in LA in the 30s and tells the story of a PI – probably Marlowe – who is asked to look after the daughter of a rich client. She’s been blackmailed and her dad is afraid that she’s got caught up in something sinister. Marlowe finds out the blackmailer owns a lucrative porn book lending business. When he goes to visit him, he finds him dead, his client’s daughter sitting stark naked and completely stoned on a chair, and someone running from the crime scene as soon as Marlowe enters. A little later, one of Steiner’s cars is found in a river, with a body in it.

Telling you more would spoil the story, but I think, this gives you an idea of what to expect.

Killer in the Rain is the novelette that’s closest to his novels in style. We can already see how different from other hard-boiled detectives Marlowe is – he isn’t named in the story, but we can assume it’s him. Marlowe cares. He’s anything but tough. Sure, he can act tough, doesn’t shy away from using a gun and shoot at someone, but he doesn’t do it lightly. As in all the later novels, solving the murder isn’t that important. Marlowe wants to help his client, keep him or her safe. While not as developed as in other books. there’s a social commentary here as well. The corruption of the police is obvious. Marlowe is one of two things that make me love Chandler so much. The other is his style. His books are written in a slang that’s not always easy to understand, especially not since a lot is made up. Chandler loved figures of speech and used them extensively in the novels. Here too, I found many wonderful sentences that made me chuckle.

“Carmen Dravec sat in Steiner’s teakwood chair, wearing her jade earrings.”

“Then all the expression went out of her white face and it looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box.”

“Her giggles ran around the room like rats.”

As the title of the novelette evokes – it’s raining a lot in this book. The weather is always important in Chandlers work. It helps to create a moody atmosphere. I can’t remember if it rains often in his other books, but it does here and in The Big Sleep.

If you’ haven’t read Chandler yet and don’t know where to start this is a good pick. If you like it, you’ll already know that there’s much more and much better stuff where this came from. As for me, I might actually become a rereader after all.

Do you have a favourite Chandler novel? Mine is The Long Goodbye.

Daphne du Maurier Week- The Birds by Daphne du Maurier versus The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock – A Post a Day in May

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Today begins Heavenali’s Daphne du Maurier week. I knew I wanted to participate but wasn’t sure how to fit it into my A Post a Day in May project. But then I had an idea that appealed to me a lot. Why not reread one of her most famous stories, The Birds, and compare it to the Hitchcock movie. And that’s what I did a couple of days ago.

April and May have been very hot here in Switzerland, sunny and with temperatures around 27°C. Not so two days ago when I finally reread and rewatched The Birds. That day was cool and rainy. Perfect weather for this creepy tale.

The short story The Birds is set in the country, near the sea. Nat is a farmhand. On the day the story begins, he notices the birds’ unusual behaviour. It is the beginning of December and the weather has changed abruptly overnight. From a mellow autumn, it is has turned into an icy winter. Could this have something to do with the birds? Is this why they flock together and thousands of seagulls cover the sea like a giant wave? And then they start to attack. Nat and his family have to barricade themselves in their house as the birds get more and more aggressive, trying to enter the house through the windows, the chimney.

I enjoyed this story so much. It’s rich in descriptive details and atmosphere. Creepy, eerie, like a good ghost story, even though that’s not what this is.

One element resonated with me a lot. While they are locked into their house, Nat and his family try to find out what’s going on, whether the government will send help, what they say is happening, and what they should do. A bit like now, and Nat and his wife get very annoyed when they realize the government is clueless. Just like now, they are absolutely no help and offer no guidance in a massive crisis.

After finishing the short story, I then watched the movie. I know I watched it many years ago and must say, the movie I rewatched had absolutely nothing to do with what I remembered of it.

Unlike the story, the movie is set in a small town. I didn’t remember how much story Hitchcock added to du Maurier’s story. Hers is very pared down and atmospheric. But Hitchcock’s film starts like a screw ball comedy. A young rich woman meets a lawyer in a bird shop in San Francisco. She then decides to bring him the love birds he wanted for his sister to his house on Bodega Bay, outside of San Francisco. Like in any screw ball comedy, they try to pretend they are mutually not interested. They tease each other and what follows is a humorous back and forth. But then a seagull attacks the woman and the story changes.

I must say, I was disappointed in the movie. It lacked atmosphere, almost felt like two films in one. Of course, for its time it’s a great movie but I liked the short story so much better, found it so much more effective. Not for one second did I find the movie eerie. If I had watched this a few weeks after reading the story or without even rereading the story, my reaction would have been different, I’m sure. It’s obvious that Hitchcock only used the story as an inspiration. I read once that he always started with an image and this is possibly the case here too. He was fascinated by the idea of all those birds gathering. And for its time, those attack scenes are well done. That he added a love story and complex characters, is an interesting choice. I like that he chose to go deeper, introduce us to complex characters with backstory, but I’m not sure why he chose to start with some type of screw ball comedy. Maybe he hoped the contrast would intensify the horror that follows? I am probably not doing it justice. Someone who doesn’t know the story, might find the movie terrifying.

It was certainly an interesting experience to compare the two and made me realize that I want to read more of her, and definitely rewatch many of his movies and discover those I don’t know yet. Luckily, I have two Hitchcock collections here. Over twenty movies in total. And I also own Truffaut’s book on Hitchcock, which I should finally read.

Which is your favourite du Maurier book? And which is your favourite Hitchcock movie?