I am homes

Quotational endorsements on book covers don't always give you a lot of insight into the real impact of a piece of potential literature. A quick browse of my roommate's bookshelf tells me "The Time Traveler's Wife" is -- and I nearly quote -- enchantingly beautiful and dazzlingly romantic. But that doesn't make me want to read it. At all. Luckily, works that are both amazing and aged penetrate enough intellectual minds to accumulate more thoughtful words. In those cases, pull quotes are classy and beautifully free of exclamation points. Such an inspired word byte appears on the backside of "Don't Look Now," a collection of Daphne du Maurier short stories. The little nugget of wisdom caught my attention because its author was able to say exactly what I had been thinking the whole time: "Daphne du Maurier's genius lay in her plots, which she spun with astounding originality and ease ... (they) have an effectiveness that makes them seem almost traditional, belonging not to any one author but to the imagination of the world." -- Alberto Manguel. When you read Daphne's stories, you feel as if you're reading fables of the ages -- tales that have been embedded in the collective subconscious since tales were things to tell. The kicker is that you simultaneously feel like du Maurier's singular imagination is a bottomless pit of newness. What this adds up to is that these are stories that simply need to be written, told, heard.

Du Maurier writes little mysteries -- riddles almost -- that tangle like hair and resolve like the release of a long-held breath. For me, each story was a tiny masterpiece, from "The Birds" to the lengthy "Monte Verita." I can honestly say there wasn't a story there I didn't finish without a satisfied smile slowly creeping up my cheeks. But so out of reverence for my obsession, I don't intend to expound upon my individual infatuations with du Maurier bits until my second readings of them. I'll obsess, but I won't over-permeate. Which leads me to post-part 2.

On my way to Short Story Town, I most recently finished the A.M. Homes collection "The Safety of Objects." I sped through this large-fonted paperback, relishing the stories in a similarly rewarding way. Du Maurier tells stories you can feel in the world's imagination; Homes tells stories you knew existed, but until now, no one would admit to it. You want to point your finger at the characters and yell in italics: "I knew it!" These aren't fairy tales, they're tattle-tales. They're windows into our neighbors' homes. You might see into their hearts, more likely you will see into their pants -- and it's not pretty. Homes knows how to convey familiar (if ugly) sensations, like the sweaty thigh sticking to the vinyl lawn chair or the chewiness of a Barbie doll foot in a child's mouth -- as well as unfamiliar urges like the near-heartbreaking quest of a kidnapper to replace his (dead?) son, or the desperation of a mother who goes to extremes to end her family's suffering. On top of this, she outs the secret sexual curiosities of ages 1 to 100, with a precision that keeps the reader one step short of uncomfortable. We ogle, but we know these are the exploits of others. It's the type of "fiction" we see sometimes exposed in the news, but more often we picture it the ignorance of trailer trash or the stuff of Lifetime movies. "Stiletto sharp," says the front cover quote.

Speaking of movies, I'm planning to watch "The Safety of Objects" in film form asap ... and I'm hoping "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" aren't far off the horizon. Apparently D du M wasn't much of a fan of Hitchcock's version of the latter, but that only makes me want to see it all the more. I've got another short-story master on deck, this time it's inspired by what inspired Daphne. "Stories" by Katherine Mansfield ... I figure if Daphne loved "Jane Eyre," we might have more tastes in common. But not before I finish my detour in man-town with "On the Road." Then maybe I'll pull A.M. Homes's "Music for Torching" out of the dugout. It's the continued story of a set of surburbanites who spend their staycation experimenting with crack. Yes, crack.

obsession

It always starts with "Rebecca." The book that is so good you don't want to share it with anyone. It never leaves you. It possesses you. It possesses me, and now so does its author. I'm not sure I could accurately explain how my obsession with Daphne du Maurier has come about, only that I'm basically in love with her. Or maybe I just wish I could have been her in another life. Alas, I can only hang onto the thought that I was born about eight years before she died -- so we shared some meaningless time on Earth together. Twenty years later, the dormant presence has come back to life.

The obsession began when I declared "Rebecca" my favorite book. But I wasn't convinced the author could interest me further until I learned of her association with Alfred Hitchcock. I let the thought marinate all through "Jamaica Inn," but the fever hadn't quite peaked. The day I bought the story collection "Don't Look Now," I knew I was in for something, and it took me to about page 3 to figure out that du Maurier would soon dominate me. With each page she owned me more and more, and by the time I'd finished "Monte Verita," I knew I had to get my hands on every piece of this woman's work.

I bought a decrepit copy of "Rule Britannia" at a used bookstore (surprisingly not The Strand) and added a heap of fiction and biographies to my Amazon wish list. I repeatedly fondled a copy of "The Daphne du Maurier Companion" at my nearest Barnes & Noble, but opted not to drop the $18 in favor of my favorite contemporary author, A.M. Homes, when a coupon begged redemption. But The Strand did beckon, and I swooped in on the D shelf and snagged a handful of relics as a Christmas present to myself. Those plus a couple more I got for Christmas, and my current collection is as follows:

Rebecca
Jamaica Inn
Rule Britannia
Don't Look Now
Myself When Young - The Shaping of a Writer
Mary Anne
My Cousin Rachel
The du Mauriers
The Young George du Maurier
The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories
The Daphne du Maurier Companion
Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster
Daphne du Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir by Flavia Leng

It's a short list compared to what I'll continue to compile over the years, and doesn't even include other things I'm buying as companions to the collection, such as works by her grandfather and sister, and others that inspired her in some way (I've already invested in "Tales from Shakespeare" by Charles Lamb and "Stories" by Katherine Mansfield). I've also now seen the Hitchcock "Rebecca," as well as "Daphne" and its accompanying "Vanishing Cornwall."

It's time I admit it: I'm a total geek. But why not? It's about time I had something to collect other than random books I "might" like. Besides, it's a match made in heaven -- there's the sea, there's writing, there's reclusive nature, a desire to wear pants rather than dresses ... there's Cornwall (can I mention that's where Tori Amos lives? Rereading my mention of the Tori song in an earlier post has total new meaning. It wasn't just a coincidence!).

There are so many details I'd love to go into, but I'm just a du Maurier baby-fan. I can dream of being an authority, writing research papers for no one but myself to read, attending the festivals, acquiring that rare, signed first edition (I already made one purchase from The Strand's Rare Book Room -- so it was only $15 and unsigned, it's still cool as hell). I want to dig, I want to know, but it's barely the honeymoon stage and I'm already the jealous boyfriend. I'll read the professional criticisms but shield my eyes from Goodreads or Amazon "comments" on the lady. What could they know?! They don't love her like I do! It's mine and you can't have it. More to come.

picking some brains

Moving into an apartment that puts you one short subway stop away from work is a surefire way to slow down your reading progress if you're used to the trip taking an hour. In the past five months, I've managed to make it through a few great books, though. Unfortunately, the closest I've gotten to blogging about them is the automatic Goodreads updates that tell you things like I'm on page 100 of "Comic Book Tattoo," a Tori Amos collector's item I got for Christmas, and will likely get into here a little later.

The first book I started after Olive Kitteridge, I believe, was Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I was heading back into my nonfiction stream, and I wanted to wax philosophical. I didn't quite make it all the way to the end, though the 225 pages I did read were amazing, and I plan to finish it off in the not-so-distant future. That book is best read in long sittings, and after August and September I was quite short on those. But I can say I underlined in red something on almost every single page of that little 380-page pink book. I'd like to do a more in-depth post on it one day when I start reading the end of it. But I'll grab a random snippet: "She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before." How appropriate.

"Zen" was too heavy for short sittings, but I wanted to stay with the "inspirational" nonfiction, so I read "On Writing" by Stephen King. And it was very inspiring -- it made me want to write both fiction and memoir (and even read more memoirs of authors). I've always been a King fan, though I've barely put a dent in the 10 or so novels of his that I own, my favorite being "Dolores Claiborne," of course. Anyway, I liked "On Writing" for its honesty. You got to see Stephen at home, letting his wife make sweeping literary decisions for him, and him being perfectly happy to have it that way. He made me want to get on paper every potentially silly (read: groundbreaking) idea that pops into my head. I'll have to spend some time identifying my Ideal Reader, though. Maybe it's him. I feel like I could go to "On Writing" with a question, and Stephen would answer it. Reading that book is like having a conversation with the man. He made himself the protagonist of a plotless narrative, and I felt I knew him pretty well by the end.

Inspired by King's "Carrie" confessions, I decided it was high time I read that classic. I can't remember why, but I was quickly distracted from it. There's a mysterious black hole in my memory (well, that's not so mysterious if you know me), where I might have picked up something else, but eventually I ended up cracking another author memoir, this time A.M. Homes's "The Mistress's Daughter." I put a short review of this one on Goodreads, where I express my desire for "more narrative and less fact-spewing" about the adoptee's reunion with her biological parents. I hope Homes writes another memoir, and I'd hope for something under the category of "more personal," but you don't get much more personal than your search for identity. And the drama isn't missing. On page 60 Homes drops the drama into one succinct sentence: "Ellen thinks I'm her mother, Norman thinks I am Ellen, and Norman's wife thinks I am the mistress reincarnate." But it's interesting to watch Homes dig into her ancestry, more so on the reflective side than the genealogical analysis. When her biological mother dies, she goes through this relative stranger's things and finds pieces of herself: "It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology. In her pockets I find the same things I find in mine" (page 98). You don't have to be adopted to appreciate her words. "Did I ever say how precariously positioned I feel--on the edge of the earth, as though my permit could be revoked at any second?" (page 117)