Usually when I read a book, I dog-ear the pages when I come across a particularly interesting, salient quote that grabs my attention and then when writing this blog (side note: for some reason when I type out the word "blog", my fingers inevitably type it out as the word "blob". I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something...), I go back to all of the pages I dog-eared to see if there are any I liked enough to use as the title for the post.
For Rebecca, I had quite a few that I had liked very much ("Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind." And "They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word."), but I really had to choose the first sentence of the novel. Because in such a simple first chapter, the tone is set for the rest of the book. You know something terrible happened to this couple to drive them to their current location and dynamic, and clearly this location, Manderley, played a significant role.
Suffice it to say, I am obsessed with this book. I loved it. Cover to cover. Every word. Every page. I just loved it. I read 200+ pages in 3 days. Once I got going, I just could not put it down. The way the suspense was conveyed was so well done. It wasn't a murder mystery, it wasn't a horror novel. It was so subtle that you didn't even really know what was wrong with the situation, but just that something was off. Was it the house? Was the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, really evil? Was the narrator just a bit crazy herself? But all is revealed in time, and there was one bit fat surprise twist about two-thirds of the way through the book that I did NOT see coming at all. I can absolutely see how this book would so marvelously lend itself to Hitchcock's deft hand (more on that in a moment). Psychological suspense at it's finest.
And I've always been a sucker for mystery novels. I pretty voraciously read as much Agatha Christie as I possibly could when I was in middle school/high school. And just the intrigue to the stories got me, particularly when they're set in mansions. I don't know why the idea of old, ornate mansions fascinates me so much (I recently discovered that I have this same fondness for movies, particularly offbeat wacky comedies like Clue and Murder By Death. I could watch these damn movies over and over again, certainly not because they're very good movies, but because they hit some strange chord with me). So when I started reading this book, it so easily fell into that milieu that I have loved so much and haven't really read much of lately, which may have contributed to me enjoying it as much as I did.
I can not WAIT to watch the movie of Rebecca. However, once again, it's not available On Demand so I'll have to wait until the mister can get it through Netflix. He assures me sometime in December, and I'm sure I'll be pestering him as often as I think I can get away with before driving him crazy. Usually after I finish reading a book, I'll do a quick internet search to read about themes etc that others have noted in the book, or read about movie adaptations. And when I read about the film adaptation for Rebecca, it seems that at the time Hitchcock made Rebecca, Hollywood production code required that if a character had murdered someone, the murderer would have to be punished for his/her crime (quite different from movies today, right? Keeping morality and social codes in movies? That's crazy talk!). So I imagine that the ending of the movie is quite different than the book, and I'm not sure that I want to there to be a different ending than what was presented in the book, but I'll have to wait and see how I feel about it...
So on to the next one, which is The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. I had no idea what the novel was about when I chose it, and I seem to be inadvertently choosing novels about late 1800s/early 1900s society with some kind of adultery or impropriety driving the story along (between this one, the Age of Innocence, and Rebecca). I'm sure I'll be ready to mix it up once I'm done with The Good Soldier (and I have Shakespeare on deck next, so I'm sure that will sufficiently squash my turn of the century mindset).
245 books to go.
