Reading Rebecca

seaopaque and I are reading Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca because her mentor suggested it as a reference point for seaopaque's own novel (her novel! I love saying that), and because I, having minimal ability to generate structure in my life independently, do better if I have a reading project.

I think my comrade is mowing through Manderley at speed; I'm following along at an amble -- I'm on page 121 of 302. This is partly because of the weird motility of Du Maurier's prose. It flows forward, brisk and fluid. Yet the action it describes is so profoundly uncomfortable, while withholding for a long time the source of this discomfort, that reading Rebecca is a bit like being guided through an awful party without a visible exit. In this, the novel reminds me of Shirley Jackson or Patricia Highsmith. All three authors are experts in evoking the excruciating in the apparently ordinary, and the alarming psychological excrescences beneath banal situations. It's beautifully done, but it is designed to make me tense and it does, so I take breaks.

( Further thoughts on Rebecca: Men with houses, women with dreams )

I've seen the movie several times, though not recently (googles, starts streaming movie) and it seems to me that it captures the mood of the book better than any other adaptation, or anyway any adaptation I'm currently able to access in memory. I know it well enough that, beginning to read, I wasn't sure if I might actually have read the book before.

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The amazing story of that time I went for a walk

First proper solitary walk of the season today. I got restless around 11:00, and decided to go for a ramble. Well, first I piled up my shopping bag at BPAL with pleasures I can't afford in order to counteract my malaise. Then I decided I should distract myself with the promise of something less catastrophic for my (currently hypothetical) savings. Say, fancy chocolate.

( The sun came out as I was walking towards Oak Bay, and followed me wherever I walked. )

 This is maybe the best thing about living here, the way it is possible to become lost almost immediately, and yet always be able to locate yourself again by finding the sea, which can be sighted or stumbled upon in almost any direction (except true north.) I reached home after five and a half hours or so of walking, sore in the joints but much improved in almost every particular, including the matter of chocolate.

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