Choosing a book to read or the next movie to watch, people tend to trust the description, all kinds of reviews and the abundance of pathos in the annotation of the work. To my great regret, all modern prose is built on the same principle - to make a bestseller of big words on the flyleaf. Diana Setterfield's “Thirteenth Tale” is one of the most advertised and recoverable prosaic “masterpieces”. Based on the motives of this novel, even the film was made; we will also talk about it, but later.
Pros and Cons of a Book
Advantages:
- easy to read;
- mystery is present;
- gives rise to a sense of an autobiographical story, not a fictional one.
What I like most about the novel is the so-called “Matryoshka effect”, when the book is about books, about writers and readers.
Margaret Lee is an ordinary girl reading classical literature. She does not recognize contemporary authors at all (the proximity of the reader to the hero also causes sympathy). So, the girl’s fate changed dramatically when the most famous writer of their day, Vida Winter, offered the girl to work as her biographer.
Miss Winter is a special lady, the embodiment of the riddle. She never once told the truth about her biography to any of the journalists, but told fascinating stories with a fantastic plot. And so, the further narration in the novel is the content of the conversations between the writer and Margaret Lee.
The stories of Miss Winter make the reader end up in a gothic castle filled with ghosts, feel all the tension of relations, and see with their own eyes strange, even scary situations. I will not spoil it, but just say that the biography presented in the form of a story is the best way to transmit information, because readers easily perceive words and literally “glide” through the pages.
Disadvantages:
- It does not carry any morality, it is impossible to make a conclusion after all that has been read, to extract something useful;
- Now about the gothic. What can be Gothic in a novel whose events can easily be carried over to the present? Twins whose father is a uncle. Crazy children who do not know basic rules of behavior and hygiene. A fire that did not happen by chance. All of the above - these days, it is sad to admit it. It seems that Diana Setterfield just wanted to add Gothic to her creation, but she did not understand where to get it and how to correctly present it.
To compare The Thirteenth Tale with the Bronte novel is blasphemous and unfair. Jane Eyre is an image of nobility, an icon-girl of English literature, while twin girls, whose life is discussed by Setterfield, are spoiled psychopaths who grew up in an abnormal family.
Pros and cons of the film
Now about the film (2013). A good film adaptation, but most of the book is missing.
I did not like the image of Margaret Lee. According to the description, the heroine should be a young woman who is distinguished by her dreaminess and love for the classics, in the film we see a masculine girl trying to get to the bottom of everything.
Concerning the actors, the opinion is very subjective, but I liked to see a familiar face - Sophie Turner in the role of the third sister.
