Nemonymous
Grimscribe
MISS PLARR
"Even late at night, when the structure of the house expressed itself with a fugue of noises, Miss Plarr augmented this decrepit music with her own slow pacing upon the stairs or outside of my door."
With his mother bedridden with a "pseudo-illness", this is another boy in his room sketching (or sketching after she arrived), and instead of Father Sevich, we have here, yes, her arrival, that of Miss Plarr, a hauntingly dark version of another housekeeper or governess with the initials MP, I guess, but Plarr's role is at first uncertain as is the place uncertain where she has billeted herself in the house with her suitcase.
You know, re-reading all these stories, as I have done, in the last week or so, means that I have been spoilt with riches. If I had read this story alone without reading any of the others, I would have considered it a masterpiece, and it probably is, but I find it difficult now to see the landings from the hallways, the operatic TrageDIE from the cloying relationships in almost Scriabinesque counterpoint summoned by this and the previous story. Difficult to see the human author from the visionary conduit.
This story is not just a Turn of the Screw, but an anguished tightening, a bolting of things down for the Aspergic. Towering edifices that double as castles or crypts in comparison with a small attic. Another instructor from a Night School who needs to teach how lurid things are. That 'stinging air' evoking the thrashing of demons or, for me, the eventual knotting of such "long whips lashing in darkness." Brutality and exile. The teacher and the taught, just another loan back and forth?
This writer honouring which of his readers as the heir of his visions and other "visceral practices"? I now approach the end of my review of this monumental book.
(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)
"Even late at night, when the structure of the house expressed itself with a fugue of noises, Miss Plarr augmented this decrepit music with her own slow pacing upon the stairs or outside of my door."
With his mother bedridden with a "pseudo-illness", this is another boy in his room sketching (or sketching after she arrived), and instead of Father Sevich, we have here, yes, her arrival, that of Miss Plarr, a hauntingly dark version of another housekeeper or governess with the initials MP, I guess, but Plarr's role is at first uncertain as is the place uncertain where she has billeted herself in the house with her suitcase.
You know, re-reading all these stories, as I have done, in the last week or so, means that I have been spoilt with riches. If I had read this story alone without reading any of the others, I would have considered it a masterpiece, and it probably is, but I find it difficult now to see the landings from the hallways, the operatic TrageDIE from the cloying relationships in almost Scriabinesque counterpoint summoned by this and the previous story. Difficult to see the human author from the visionary conduit.
This story is not just a Turn of the Screw, but an anguished tightening, a bolting of things down for the Aspergic. Towering edifices that double as castles or crypts in comparison with a small attic. Another instructor from a Night School who needs to teach how lurid things are. That 'stinging air' evoking the thrashing of demons or, for me, the eventual knotting of such "long whips lashing in darkness." Brutality and exile. The teacher and the taught, just another loan back and forth?
This writer honouring which of his readers as the heir of his visions and other "visceral practices"? I now approach the end of my review of this monumental book.
(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)
