Related Articles
By Sadie Stein
Dear readers,
I don’t require a dedicated ghost-story season. To me, that would be like loving people only on Feb. 14, or pretending canned tomatoes don’t exist. Besides, as I understand it, ghosts don’t work on schedule.
But in case you’re stricter than the undead and I, here are two less explicit examples of the uncanny that take the definition of “haunting” and bend it like the sad, stale Laffy Taffy at the bottom of your trick-or-treat pumpkin. Of course, they can be read at any time of year — in costume, if you see fit.
—Sadie
“I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys,” by Miranda Seymour
Nonfiction, 2022
For the past few months, this terrific biography of Jean Rhys has been my insomnia companion: a substantive piece of nonfiction to dip into when I wake up at 2 a.m. and only an hour’s reading will put me back to sleep. (Unlike Sally Rooney, I love biographies of writers.) Yet it’s anything but lulling — rather, it feels like the kind of book whose charms are thrown into relief by the privacy of sleeplessness.
Although almost every aspect of Rhys’s life has been, in the biographer’s words, “pitilessly scrutinized” and eagerly conflated with those of her often tricky antiheroines, Seymour was the first to travel to the Caribbean island of Dominica, where Rhys grew up as the descendant of British colonials whose sugar-plantation-based fortune had long since dissipated. Yes, this informed her masterpiece “Wide Sargasso Sea” in the most literal sense: She knew the people, the land, the social hierarchies, the tangled racial and social politics. But she also knew what it was to be the outsider, the villain, the minor character.
More than seeing this as an easy lens into Rhys’s work, the prolific Seymour regards it as a necessary part of understanding her notoriously troubled life. By turns self-destructive and disciplined, filled with self-loathing and self-regard, capable of incredible cruelty, great beauty, all the usual contradictions on a huge scale and, frankly, an eye-popping level of sheer awfulness, Rhys as a character makes for a terrific companion to her five novels and many stories. But Seymour’s biography is also a good read in its own right, and catnip to those of us with an interest in literary bohemia.
The title, incidentally, is a reference to a short, terrifyingly oblique ghost story the author wrote at age 89.
Read if you like: “Wide Sargasso Sea,” “We Were All So Young,” Miranda Seymour’s previous biographies of Ottoline Morrell and Mary Shelley.Available from: Parnassus Books, among other fine retailers.
“The Toys of Princes,” by Ghislain de Diesbach
Fiction, 1960 (in this translation)
If I am honest, I had thought no work of automaton-focused gothic horror could equal Daphne du Maurier’s deeply weird “The Doll.” And then a reader was kind enough to introduce me to this collection of short fiction, translated from the French and introduced by Richard Howard, in which, just for starters, a Mitteleuropean monarch becomes part of an automaton ménage à quatre, in which the doll partners sport the skin of guillotined aristocrats. (More happens, but this does happen.) Think the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann crossed with a Voltaire satire, then add a dash of Colette’s urbanity and the midcentury surety of a prolific writer enshrined by the pre-1968 Académie Française. There are love-god chauffeurs and a beauty contest for male students and — well, just read “The Canoness Vanishes.” It’s a time capsule, yes, but a fascinatingly bizarre and entertaining one.
Read if you like: “Eyes Without a Face,” Stefan Zweig, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”Available from: Turtle Point Press
Why don’t you …
Smile? Rhys’s unfinished memoir, “Smile Please,” deserves a recommendation of its own. It’s as acrid and raw a piece of work as I’ve ever read — a document of disappointment and self-abnegation and finger-pointing. As if all this were not bliss enough, Diana Athill wrote the introduction to the first edition.
Dance to the music of time? Speaking of E.T.A. Hoffman, you may not be able to see the New York City Ballet’s production of the Hoffmann story “Coppelia” (I took my son to a highly redacted children’s program) but it’s well worth finding online. (And I have to give points to the N.Y.C.B. Instagram gods for the headline: “Doll check-in.”)
Go house hunting? I won’t pretend to understand if you’re not into mannikins, but I will respect it. For a cheap hit of pure chills, may I recommend Flame Tree’s recent anthology, “Haunted House Stories”? You’ll find some of the classics — Edith Wharton’s “Mr. Jones” and “Lost Hearts,” by M.R. James — but “The Lost Ghost” (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) and H.D. Everett’s “A Water Witch” were new to me.
Thank you for being a subscriber
Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.
Friendly reminder: check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online.
<
