Classics corner / The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson / Review

Classics corner

Short stories

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – review

Stephanie Cross

Sun 16 Jan 2011 00.05 GMT

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he title story might be the one for which Shirley Jackson is famed but, as this volume suggests, it was not entirely typical of her oeuvre. First published in 1948, "The Lottery" details a long-established rite that culminates in murder. Elsewhere, however, Jackson aims to disquiet rather than shock: the threat is often latent in Jackson's work,as Donna Tartt has observed. The weird farming community of "The Lottery" seems likewise anomalous: Jackson's protagonists tend to be mothers, or women starting their homemaking careers.

Classics corner / The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

 

Classics corner

Ten Haunted House Stories

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Sophie Missing enjoys the 'definitive haunted house story'

Sophie Missing
Sunday 7 February 2010

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hirley Jackson might seem an unlikely pioneer of the supernatural horror genre. A housewife who lived in Bennington, Vermont, she is best known for the large number of short stories in which she exposed the dark underbelly of small town American life. The Haunting of Hill House, her penultimate novel (first published in 1959), is a chilling and highly accomplished piece of writing, justly described by Stephen King as one of the most important horror novels of the 20th century.

Classics corner / The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole / Review

 

Classics corner

Ten Haunted House Stories

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

By turns lurid, sensational and amusing, this 18th-century gothic romance remains a tour de force, says Sophie Missing

Sophie Missing
Sun 14 Mar 2010 00.06 GMT

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olitician and man of letters Horace Walpole was a trendsetter. His house in Twickenham kick-started a revival in gothic architecture, and the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 sparked the vogue for gothic romance in English literature.

Classics corner / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner / Review

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner – review

This early feminist classic is also an enchanting tale

The 100 best novels / No 52 / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

Lucy Scholes
Sunday 18 March 2012

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ylvia Townsend Warner's first novel (published in 1926) begins with 28-year-old Lolly Willowes being sent, "as if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will", to live with her brother and his family after the death of her father. She is "so useful and obliging" but after 19 years finds her senses dulled and her mind "groping after something that eluded her experience".

Escape beckons when she decides to move to the village of Great Mop in the Chilterns. And here, this satirical social commentary takes a turn towards the fantastic as Lolly sells her soul to the devil – "a kind of black knight, wandering about and succouring decayed gentlewomen" – and becomes a witch.

Lolly's own realisation of what she has done strikes with the rapidity and venom of "a snake-bite in the brain", just as the novel sharply undercuts its genteel appearance to reveal a dark and visceral heart riddled with gloriously uneasy images (a young woman eats "with the stealthy persistence of a bitch that gives suck").

Lolly Willowes calls for "a life of one's own" three years before Virginia Woolf's impassioned cry for a room. "We have more need of you," she explains to the devil. "Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance." With its clear feminist agenda, Lolly Willowes holds its own among Townsend Warner's historical fiction, but it's also an elegantly enchanting tale that transcends its era.

THE GUARDIAN

Classics corner 006 / The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Classics corner

No 006

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by Scott Fitzgerald

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he Curious Case of Benjamin Button belongs to that category of short story - Kafka's The Metamorphosis is the most celebrated example - in which an absurd conceit is established at the outset, and is then played out in a realist vein. Here the conceit is that a man is born with the body and mind of a 70-year-old, and proceeds to live his life in reverse. The joke is that no one else seems to notice; or at any rate, they regard Benjamin Button's inverted progress not as a flagrant violation of the laws of science, but as an embarrassing social problem.

Accordingly, when Benjamin is born in 1860s Baltimore, the doctors at the hospital react with anger, telling his parents: "It's perfectly outrageous!" His father's first thought is of having to walk his geriatric son home ("People would stop to speak to him, and what was he going to say?"). Benjamin reaches school age, but doesn't mix with other children - though he gets on well with his grandfather. At 18, his father enrols him at Yale, but on his first day he is chased away. His father gives him a job in his dry goods business, and with his (by now) middle-aged brain Benjamin is soon running the show. He becomes rich, and takes a much younger wife, but later discovers that he no longer finds her attractive, and prefers to go out dancing all night ...

And so it goes on, all the way to the cradle. Fitzgerald's wonderfully simple story is a kind of conjuring trick, an exercise in forcing the impossible into the mundane. You end it both amused and slightly saddened. For the most curious thing about Benjamin Button's life is how ordinary it seems. All the usual triumphs and miseries are there: it's just that the start and end aren't the same.

THE GUARDIAN

CLASSICS CORNER

2009

001 Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

002 The Tale by Joseph Conrad

003 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

004 Bulldog Drummond by Sappe

005 The Pilgrims by Mary Shelley

006 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by Fitzgerald Scott

Classics corner 005 / The Pilgrims by Mary Shelley

Classics corner

No 005

The Pilgrims by Mary Shelley

Katie Toms
Sunday 8 February 2009

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iming to revive "unjustly neglected and little known works" of great authors, Hesperus has gathered for the first time five of Mary Shelley's short stories published between 1829 and 1837. As Kamila Shamsie notes in her affectionate foreword, the tragic details of Shelley's life are never far from her work, and this collection is held together with the theme of loss.

Mary Shelley suffered the death of her two eldest children, followed by the loss of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. From anyone else, such descriptions of grief and pain as: "My brain and heart seemed on fire, whilst my blood froze in my veins" would seem melodramatic. Here, they are weighted by experience.

But it is to the father-daughter relationship that Shelley returns time and again. She described her attachment to her father William Godwin as "excessive and romantic", a bond fired by the death of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft days after her birth. All but one of these stories centre on a woman torn between father and lover, a position Shelley found herself in when Godwin was outraged at her attachment to his protege. This terrible choice is most dramatically played out in The Dream, in which Constance de Villeneuve seeks St Catherine's counsel on whether to embrace the lover who fought against her dead father.

Shelley might be best known for her visionary Frankenstein, but this collection is no less powerful, marrying thought-provoking storytelling with a fascinating glimpses into the mind of a woman whose life was uncommonly marked by grief.

THE GUARDIAN

CLASSICS CORNER

2009

001 Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

002 The Tale by Joseph Conrad

003 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

004 Bulldog Drummond by Sappe

005 The Pilgrims by Mary Shelley

006 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by Fitzgerald Scott

Classics corner 193 / I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou / Review

CLASSICS CORNER No 196

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou – review

The first volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography is proof of her inner strength and a testament to the power of words

Anita Sethi
Sunday 18 August 2013 00.03 BST

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he caged bird "sings of freedom", writes Maya Angelou in her poem "Caged Bird" – a poignant recurring image throughout her work, as she eloquently explores the struggle to become liberated from the shackles of racism and misogyny. This evocative first volume of her six books of autobiography, originally published in 1969 (1984 in the UK), vividly depicts Angelou's "tender years" from the ages of three to 16, partly in the American south during the depression-wracked 1930s, while also offering timeless insights into the empowering quality of books.

The painful sense of being unwanted haunts her early childhood, for when Maya (then known as Marguerite) is three and her brother Bailey four they are sent to the "musty little town" of segregated Stamps, Arkansas wearing tags on their wrists addressed to "To whom it may concern", dispatched by their parents in California who had decided to end their "calamitous marriage". Living with their grandmother, "Momma", who owns a general merchandise store, and Uncle Willie, they suffer racist incidents both in the store and on the streets – nowhere feels safe. Sent to live with her mother, Maya endures the trauma of rape by her mother's lover Mr Freeman ("a breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart"). After Freeman is murdered, she stops speaking, frightened of words.

Angelou finds her voice and a love of language and books through the help of Mrs Bertha Flowers who, writes Angelou, "has remained throughout my life the measure of what a human being can be". The memoir's absorbing emotional arc traces Angelou's growth from inferiority complex to confidence, finding the strength to tackle "the puzzle of inequality and hate" and be hired as the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco thanks to her "honeycomb of determination".

Challenging societal structures, Angelou also succeeds in altering literary structures, experimenting with the capabilities of memoir – indeed, her editor had dared her to "write an autobiography as literature". Told with a winning combination of wit and wisdom, this is a paean to the powers of storytelling to build bridges across divides, and heal what has been damaged.

THE GUARDIAN

Classics Corner 181 / G. by John Berger / Review by Anthony Cummins

CLASSICS CORNER

No 181

G by John Berger – review

John Berger's 1972 Booker prize-winning novel rewards serious reading

Anthony Cummins
Sunday 19 May 2013 00.05 BST

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he one thing people tend to know about G is that when it won the Booker in 1972, John Berger ˚pledged half his prize money to the Black Panthersin order to "turn the prize against itself" (a reference to the Caribbean sugar, or slave labour, that had fed the sponsor's wealth). This all but guaranteed the novel's place in literary history, if not actual readers: Tom McCarthy's C (2010) could advertise a heavy debt to its structure and themes yet still be hailed as a breakthrough.

We're not invited to care about the philandering hero so much as grapple with the historical and philosophical reflections that Berger pegs to his pan-European escapades. Giovanni – G – is the product of an Italian merchant's adulterous fling with a footloose Anglo-American fresh from ditching her millionaire mineral-baron husband at 19. She sends the boy to cousins on a farm in England, where a piano-playing governess awakens the lust that proves the keynote in a series of fragmented episodes set during the years before the first world war – a prospect G relishes on account of all the women it will widow.

"Why does writing about sexual experience reveal so strikingly what may be a general limitation of literature in relation to aspects of all experience?" he asks; an 11-page essay on the problem draws an analogy with blackberries before resorting to the kind of sketch you might find in a public toilet. It isn't for sniggerers: you can't enjoy G without taking it as seriously as Berger does, but the sense of a writer giving everything he's got makes that easier than you'd think.

THE GUARDIAN

Classics corner 140 / Dracula by Bram Stoker / Review

Illustration by Fernando Vicente

Classics corner

No 140 

Dracula by Bram Stoker – review

Colm Tóibín's introduction to Bram Stoker's Dracula puts the work precisely into biographical and historical context

Anita Sethi
Sun 24 Jun 2012

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arking the centenary of Bram Stoker's death, this new edition has an incisive introduction by Colm Tóibín. With razor-sharp acuity, Tóibín examines the context which produced popular culture's most frightening vampire. 

Tóibín unmasks the connections between the Irish author's life – as servant to the tyrannical actor Henry Irving, who relished diabolic roles – and literature. Intriguingly, he identifies a "haunting, an interest in doubleness" in work by many writers who, like Stoker, came to London as outsiders in the era: in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. And he finds "an intense exploration of the drama surrounding visitors, travellers, intruders", which use violence, disguise, and stark imagery of isolation. 

Dracula itself opens with Jonathan Harker's evocative journal of a journey through Budapest to the "vast ruined castle" of Count Dracula located "on the edge of a terrible precipice", where the only sound is the howling of wolves. Here, he becomes prisoner. The "rather cruel-looking" Dracula is a compelling creation: a creature who has no reflection in a mirror, he unleashes his "demoniac fury". It is plot as well as place and people that give Dracula longevity: Tóibín describes "a fierce clarity in the outline" and "in how events twist and turn".

This "haunted work" was a conduit for ideas about the rational versus the unconscious being formulated by Freud. "I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool," confesses Harker in his journal. Stoker pulls the reader deep into this "imaginative whirlpool". 

Originally published in 1897, Dracula has spawned many modern-day vampires, but this most iconic character still unleashes the mind's deepest, darkest fears.

THE GUARDIAN

CLASSICS CORNER

001 Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

002 The Tale by Joseph Conrad

003 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

004 Bulldog Drummond by Sapper

097 The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato

Classics corner 139 / Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer / Review

CLASSICS CORNER 

No 126

Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer – review

These peculiar tales of life in eastern Europe showcase Isaac Bashevis Singer's genius for storytelling

Anthony Cummins
Sunday 26 February 2012 00.05 GMT

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he Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) filled his fiction with demons and imps rather than Zionists or antisemites: he felt writers could leave the real world to politicians and sociologists. Most of the four dozen or so tales in this book unfold in Jewish eastern Europe before Hitler and Stalin arrived. Among their protagonists are a cuckolded baker, a cross-dressing schoolgirl and Satan, a narrator several times over, whose dupes include a precocious scripture buff coaxed into Christianity. "If everything goes well," the devil wheedles, "they'll make you pope one day." The story ends in hell.

Singer, who won a Nobel prize in 1978, left Poland for New York before the second world war, and later pieces here draw more on Brooklyn literary life than old country folklore. While the supernatural element recedes, much peculiarity remains, and things get even funnier. A magazine asks a grumpy critic for an essay on Yiddish writers and, instead, receives one about horses, well past the deadline. The editor sees in his boss's eyes "something like the grief of a doctor when a patient comes to complain about a head cold and it turns out to be a malignant tumour".

Singer's gossipy, buttonholing style ("now listen to what happened") crackles with wit: one character learns early in life that "if one wanted to be a real Jew there was no time for anything else". Many of the best tales owe their appeal to inexplicable deeds. In "The Manuscript", a refugee crosses back into Nazi-held Warsaw to retrieve the draft novel her lover left behind. That alone would make a story, but when she returns only to find the author in bed with another woman, our shock leaves us entirely in sympathy with her impulsive response – and  in wonder at Singer's manipulative skill.

THE GUARDIAN

CLASSICS CORNER

001 Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
002 The Tale by Joseph Conrad

097 The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato

139 Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Classics corner 99 / The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato / Review

CLASSICS CORNER 

No 097

The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato – review

The late Ernesto Sábato's 1948 debut retains its power to disturb

Anthony Cummins
Sunday 22 May 2011 00.05 BST

D

isturbing, funny and still fresh, this 1948 novel narrated by an artist in jail for murder was the Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato's first book (he died last month aged 99). Juan Pablo Castel is a painter who stalks a woman named María after he notices her in a gallery studying one of his canvases with interest. The more he forces his way into her life – discovering that she has a blind husband and an ex-lover who killed himself – the more jealous he becomes. Soon his green eye gets the better of him – and María.

A perverse effect of the candour in Castel's retrospective account is that it almost makes you forget he's a murderer (and a rapist, it becomes clear). His pithy misanthropy offers readers an uncomfortable, reckless pleasure as the Buenos Aires art scene ("THE CRITICS… a plague I have never understood"), the city's postal service and people who give to charity all come in for a caustic kicking. It is hard not to relish his morose wit: "I have always had a tenderness and compassion for children (especially when through supreme mental effort I have tried to forget that they will be adults like anyone else)."

Yet as Colm Tóibín points out in a preface to this reissue of Margaret Sayers Peden's 1988 translation, while it is possible to root for Castel, it's never for very long. The lurking horror of his crime is all the more gross for its subtlety. This, for example, is how he views an awkward public encounter with his prey: "She was very restrained as she said hello, as if she wanted to prove before her two cousins that we were nothing more than friends." The level of delusion is chilling.

THE GUARDIAN

CLASSICS CORNER

001 Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
002 The Tale by Joseph Conrad

099 The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato

139 Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Classics corner 092 / Bram Stoker / Dracula

CLASSICS CORNER

No 092

Dracula by Bram Stoker – review

Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic masterpiece is an uncanny reflection of the concerns of the age

Lettie Ransley
Sunday 17 April 2011

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he latest generation of his monstrous progeny might have been something of a disappointment to Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the extent to which he has infected our cultural imagination must surely have exceeded even his wildest dreams. Narrated through a collection of diary entries and letters, Dracula tells the story of a young lawyer sent to manage the affairs of a mysterious Romanian count, only to unleash an evil which preys on those he holds dearest, until the forces of good rally to vanquish it once more.

Twilight's anaemic adolescent bloodsuckers look paler than ever next to the primal horror of Stoker's 1897 creation: a ruby-lipped ancient who corrupts the flower of Victorian womanhood, and threatens the heart of the empire itself. Stoker's tale fuses folklore and myth with scientific rationalism, psychiatry and anthropology in a manner that resembles that other great gothic creation, Frankenstein. But, like Mary Shelley's monster, the novel is much more than the sum of its parts. Despite – or perhaps because of – its many imperfections, Dracula is an uncanny reflection of Stoker's age, mirroring its prurient preoccupation with sex, sexuality and moral frailty. Sexually ambivalent, uncertain of origin, the vampire embodies the political and social neuroses of the times; Dracula's troubling associations with impurities of blood and race hint at Stoker's own insecurities about his Irish heritage, but also suggests a more pervasive concern about the dilution of British identity that came with imperial expansion.

This timely and engaging new edition incorporates the original text and annotations alongside a new introduction by Roger Luckhurst, which masterfully surveys the huge volume of critical debate the novel has stimulated, as well as a companion piece to the novel, Dracula's Guest, which offers an illuminating insight into Stoker's creative process.

THE GUARDIAN