Rebecca
I'm reading Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier for the first time. It's one my mother has read and loved, and I have a strange, reluctant relationship with books she suggests to me. It's not that I don't trust her choice in reading material, but I don't trust her choice in reading material. Perhaps because we have such different taste in genre. She prefers the realistic, stories about real people or people who could be real, living real lives or lives that could be real. I prefer the fantastical, the escape from the real. It's been a constant struggle back and forth, a clash of taste, since I was a teenager writing angry essays about why Eragon had just as much value as what she read, in the hopes it would convince her to not look down on my choice in media. But occasionally I read what she gives me, and it always surprises me how much I enjoy it.
On the first page of Rebecca, Du Maurier gives this description: "The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the archway of a church." This sentence gripped me in the way good descriptions always do, making me read it over and over again just to savor the way the words drew a picture in my imagination. It is a quintessential gothic description. A little bit spooky, a little bit erotic, a little bit religious. It sets a tense tone for the novel, especially in the context of the larger first chapter, like the feeling that something might be hiding in the shadows, waiting to jump out. It reminds me of the stories I read and loved in a college gothic literature class I took.
Perhaps I'll enjoy this one too.