You're like ice: until you melt, you're as strong as stone, but when you melt, not even a trace of you will be left. i generally have little patience for powerful emotions resulting in physical illness, but there are occasional lines like these: It is occasionally a little overblown for my tastes. and then horrible things happen, as they will in russian literature. So anyway, she is naturally overwhelmed by it, (what's hotter than faust after all, am i right, ladies?) and this does indeed give rise to powerful emotions. our "hero" is having none of that, and determines to expose her to his great love of literature, and insists on reading to her, and her pesky husband, from faust. despite being married now, with children of her own, she still obeys the commands of her now-deceased overbearing mother to avoid fiction and poetry at all costs, with their deleterious effects on the mind. it details the a story of the relationship that develops between a man and a woman with whom he was enamored in his youth.
this is about the dangers of literature upon the fragile human psyche, and the transportive power of words. yeah, i said it: henry james is a drag, man. This is somewhat similar to turn of the screw with all its spooky ambiguity, but without all that tortured prose. This book contains two novellas, which is the usual format for hesperus books (and if you don't know them, you should check out their list, because they are great, and strangely - they seem to do a lot of books that involve supernatural elements from authors who don't usually do the supernatural, which is interesting. So - phew - still "real literature" and not some early russian paranormal romance. This led to a degree of criticism from those of his contemporaries who insisted on the pre-eminence of realism in literature, but such disapproval might be countered with the argument that here the supernatural should actually be interpreted not literally, but psychologically, as the projection of the characters' troubled feelings about their situation. and yet it is still a "real book" despite the presence of haints, although david would most likely be among turgenev's detractors for this. Who knew turgenev did the supernatural? well he did.
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