About this title: To read a story by Henry James is to enter a world--a rich, perfectly crafted domain of vivid language and splendid, complex characters. Devious children, sparring lovers, capricious American girls, obtuse bachelors, sibylline spinsters and charming Europeans populate these five fascinating "Nouvelles" --works which represent the author in both his early and late phases. From the apparitions of evil that haunt the governess in "The Turn Of The Screw" to the startling self-scrutiny of an egotistical man in "The Beast In The Jungle," the mysterious tumings of human behavior are skillfully and ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Bantam Classics
Date Published: 1981
ISBN-13:9780553210590ISBN:0553210599
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. A moderate amount of wear on Cover and interior pages. Cprner wear and creases on jacket. Glued binding. 450 p. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: Bantam Ed. Oct. 1981 Later Print
Binding: Softbound PB Tight
Publisher: Bantam Books, NY
ISBN-13:9780553210590ISBN:0553210599
Description: Cover Art. VG PB Softbound Clean Tight. No Dj. 7 By 4" PB 403 Pgs. Turn of the screw, washington square, daisy miller: a study, the beast in the jungle, the jolly corner. read more
"Henry James is an undeniable pain-in-the-ass to read. The sentences just meander along, picking up extra clauses like lint and dander, until they become so fluffy you can barely identify their original shape. Syntactically speaking, he is hard work, harder than Conrad, and about as hard as Proust. But he is great. This is an unbelievable work of fiction--one of the best horror stories in the English language. It is loaded with meaning, yet it is deliciously ambiguous. You could spend months arguing over what actually happens. Bottom line: a lot of work, but totally worth the effort."
"I'm kind of amazed that I read this in high school, and I'm wondering what I got out of it back then. I remember putting it on the "I like this one" list, but past that, I don't know. After a re-read, I still put it on that list, but I imagine I've put it there for very different reasons. I've struggled a long time with my relationship with Henry James; I very much appreciate him and admire him, but sometimes I do wish he'd just get to the point. He seems to do this much more gingerly in the three accompanying stories to this edition. And while they all do qualify as ghost stories, Turn of the Screw is certainly the only one I might call horrific. But the horror, to me, is absolutely internal. I don't trust our narrator for a minute, (as I fear I may have back in high school, as I hadn't been a practised enough reader to realize I don't have to trust my narrator.) I think our narrator wants a ghost story as much as we do, so she plants the images that will give her the most fright, and the true horror is that she believes her own narration. I think that there are two ways to approach Henry James; one is to search for his "moral", find the phrases that back up your theory, and compare them to the thousands of other James' theorists in print. There is always plenty of material ripe for analysis. James is nothing if not thorough in his reasoning. The other way is to simply let the words run over you and carry you along, and, even if you feel a bit mired in his wordiness, you will come out the other end of the paragraph with something close to epiphany."
So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the spectacle, he slowly changed his place - passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. They have a big sale on commas, there, Henry?
I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. That's nice. What the hell are you trying to say?
At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. You know what helps convey a real sense of action? It ain't turgid, obtuse syntax filled with three word meaningless phrases set off by commas that act as the prose equivalent of um....
I think Shakespeare said it best when he described it as both brief and tedious. Shakespeare was ostensibly describing the mechanicals' play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it's a more apt description of Screw.
One final thing that's REALLY bugging me, but is a MAJOR SPOILER, so LOOK AWAY if, for some reason, you think you may be forced to read this novella at some point in the future (it'll probably involve a gun to your head).
Here's the last sentence of the story: We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
I just shake my head in wonder. If you want a jarring ending, and one that at the same time more accurately conveys what you meant to say, change the pronoun to the now correct "I": I was alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
See how that works? See how much more it communicates that he died?
In short, what I'm trying to say is, Henry James sucks. He sucks so much that even books near this book are forced to suck."
"I have to say, you need patience to read Henry James. The man is a master of the clause and the prepositional phrase. If you are an English teacher forced to torture your students with diagramming sentences, James is your man. That being said, the stories are really quite subtle and sneakily brilliant. I kept thinking, OK, where is this going, Henry, and then we'd get there and I'd think: WOW. My favorites in this collection do not actually include "The Turn of the Screw," which was my original reason for reading it. That story is fun, but I find "The Beast in the Jungle" and "The Jolly Corner" to be my favorites--and in some ways they complement each other, with similar themes although different outcomes--and I also liked "The Tree of Knowledge." The prose here is much different than what you get with a more modern writer, but I can't help thinking none of us is capable, any more, of writing this way."
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