The 306 Greatest Books #111 - The Turn of the Screw

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List. 

Looking back at a previous Henry James book I had read, The Portrait of a Lady, I mentioned that James was an easy author to read and the story simple to follow. Not so much this time. In this story, James had a tendency to write these really long, run-on sentences the entire way through the book. I thought perhaps this would change because the story started off as a narrative by the person who is writing the framing story, supposedly James. The majority of the book though, is based on a diary by a woman who the story happened to. The writing is exactly the same in both instances, with these long, drawn out sentences, all with quite a few commas in them. Here is one for instance: "The homage of which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in it." This style is rather difficult to follow at times. Other than that, the book was rather interesting. It is about a woman who serves as a teacher for two students in a house which happens to be haunted by the former governess and the former handyman. The ending was rather cryptic though and the language made the entire book feel cryptic, like I wasn't entirely sure what was going on. But after reading a synopsis I think that I understood it pretty well as I was going. So, in summary, an intriguing story but a difficult one to understand.

The 306 Greatest Books #42 - The Portrait of a Lady

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. This book can be found on the Sybervision and the Observer Book Lists. 

The Portrait of a Lady, and Henry James in general, fall into my unmemorable category. Neither of the two stories that I have read of his on my lists I can recall at all. The Portrait of a Lady follows an American woman, Isabel Archer, who moved to Europe and ends up having to adapt from the free thinking American way of life to the more rigid thinking of England at the time. This follows the main theme of the novel, which is the mixing of the old and the new, with often disastrous consequences for the old way of life. Overall, the story is well written with an easy flow to it, however unremarkable it may be. I enjoyed reading at the time but after many years I cannot recall the plot off the top of my head at all.