Reading Wednesday
Aug. 14th, 2019 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhI Remember You by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (translation by Philip Roughton). A ghost story set in modern-day Iceland. I Remember You is split between two narratives. In the first, three friends from the city travel to a remote, abandoned village (which apparently is a real place! It looks gorgeous, but after this book, I'm not sure I want to visit) in the middle of winter, where they've bought a house that they plan on renovating and turning into a guesthouse for the hikers who come to the area in summer. The friends consist of a husband/wife couple and a newly widowed woman, whose dead husband was the other man's best friend, plus her small dog. Unfortunately there is no electricity in the village, no phone service, not a single other person staying there in winter, and the only way in or out is by boat – they've arranged to stay for a week, after which the ship's captain will return to pick them up. In addition, none of the three really knows anything about home repairs (the guesthouse plan is a desperate reaction to the financial troubles plaguing all of them all in the aftermath of Iceland's financial collapse) and the isolation and work bring out their interpersonal problems. The situation does not improve when they begin to hear footsteps in their new house and mysterious items appear in empty rooms, which seem to be linked to occasional glimpses of a small boy in the distance.
In the other narrative, Freyr is a psychiatrist in the nearest town. Being the only psychiatrist in this small town, he occasionally helps the police with their cases; lately these have included vandalism at the elementary school and an elderly woman's suicide. But as the investigations go on, these two seemingly disconnected events turn out to tie together, along with a strangely identical vandalism at the school sixty years earlier and the disappearance of Freyer's young son three years ago, whose body was never found. Freyr also begins to witness things that shouldn't be possible, from hearing his son's voice to finding inexplicable scars carved into the bodies of several accident victims. At the climax of the book, Freyr's story and that of the three friends finally come together.
I have such mixed feelings about this book! On the one hand, the writing, on a sentence-to-sentence level, is rough and desperately in need of another round of editing, which made it hard for me to sink into the story. There's also an annoyingly stereotypical and harsh depiction of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder, though thankfully it's only relevant for a few pages. On the other hand, the creepiness absolutely worked for me, and I had trouble reading I Remember You alone at night and raced through the entire thing in two days.
As a random example of what I mean about the writing:
"I'll work like the devil himself is driving me if you put those crosses back where you found them. I can't imagine having them in the house tonight," said Líf. It was a reasonable enough proposition, but no matter how much Katrín tried to pluck up her courage to go and return the crosses, she couldn't shrug off the profound sense of unease that prevented her from actually doing so.
"Agreed," she said at last.
Líf seemed to cheer up at Katrín's assent. "Good. I wouldn't sleep a wink with those things in the house."
Repetitions, awkward phrasings, explanations that seem to either drag out forever or skip ahead confusingly, unnatural dialogue – the writing never quite works as well as it could. It feels very much like a first draft. I have no idea if that's the fault of the author or the translator (or maybe it just sounded better in Icelandic), but there was something on nearly every page that I wished I could rewrite.
And yet. Like I said, I Remember You just works: the tension, the horror, and the mystery are all too powerful to be defeated by the writing. I haven't been this effectively scared by a book in years. Definitely recommended for horror fans... though I still wish I could do that rewrite first.
The Inheritor's Powder: A Tale of Arsenic, Murder, and the New Forensic Science by Sandra Hempel. Nonfiction that also splits its narrative, this time between the murder of George Bodle in 1833 England and the scientific test for detecting the presence of small amounts of arsenic that resulted.
George Bodle was an elderly and wealthy man who owned quite a lot of farmland and was a leading figure in his small town. One morning, he and four other members of his household fell violently ill after sharing a pot of coffee. The other four survived; George died. George's son and grandson promptly accused one another of poisoning him, presumably to get hold of the money and property they were due to inherit. The subsequent court case was a national sensation, followed closely in the newspapers.
Arsenic poisoning, however, looks a lot like food poisoning, cholera, and other common diseases of the time: stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea. There was no positive way to diagnose poisoning as opposed to disease, and no reliable scientific test to prove that arsenic was in a sample of food or drink. It was Bodle's death that inspired James Marsh, who testified as coroner during the trial, to invent a test that would be used in court cases for nearly 150 years.
The Inheritor's Powder isn't particularly faithful to either of these stories. Hempel has a habit of throwing in digressions on related and interesting trivia – other poisoning trials of the period; the use of arsenic to produce green dyes; medical education and prison conditions in early Victorian England; a proposed law banning women from buying arsenic, based on the assumption that they were more likely to be positioners. Which is not a complaint, because some of my favorite parts of the book came in these tangents. I was particularly fascinated by a section on the very first attempts to classify poisons – after all, how does one decide what counts as a poison? Is ground glass a poison? What about acid? Insect stings? Bites from a rabid dog? Are what we would now recognize as shellfish allergies caused by a mysterious poisonous substance that only affects some people? "Poison" seems like such a self-evident category, but it clearly wasn't at all for the first toxicologists!
Hempel's writing is shallower and more melodramatic than I expect from this genre, even ending one chapter with a set of ellipses: "It is also fatal in tiny doses, and in Britain in 1833 it was cheap and ridiculously easy to get hold of, a situation that resulted in no end of mischief..." I can almost hear the dun-dun-duuuun! sound-effect. Although I have to admit that, whatever its drawbacks, the style did make for a terrifically quick read.
Overall The Inheritor's Powder isn't the best Victorian era true-crime nonfiction I've ever read, but it's an entertaining and breezy, a bit like the very morbid beach read you never knew you needed.
In the other narrative, Freyr is a psychiatrist in the nearest town. Being the only psychiatrist in this small town, he occasionally helps the police with their cases; lately these have included vandalism at the elementary school and an elderly woman's suicide. But as the investigations go on, these two seemingly disconnected events turn out to tie together, along with a strangely identical vandalism at the school sixty years earlier and the disappearance of Freyer's young son three years ago, whose body was never found. Freyr also begins to witness things that shouldn't be possible, from hearing his son's voice to finding inexplicable scars carved into the bodies of several accident victims. At the climax of the book, Freyr's story and that of the three friends finally come together.
I have such mixed feelings about this book! On the one hand, the writing, on a sentence-to-sentence level, is rough and desperately in need of another round of editing, which made it hard for me to sink into the story. There's also an annoyingly stereotypical and harsh depiction of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder, though thankfully it's only relevant for a few pages. On the other hand, the creepiness absolutely worked for me, and I had trouble reading I Remember You alone at night and raced through the entire thing in two days.
As a random example of what I mean about the writing:
"I'll work like the devil himself is driving me if you put those crosses back where you found them. I can't imagine having them in the house tonight," said Líf. It was a reasonable enough proposition, but no matter how much Katrín tried to pluck up her courage to go and return the crosses, she couldn't shrug off the profound sense of unease that prevented her from actually doing so.
"Agreed," she said at last.
Líf seemed to cheer up at Katrín's assent. "Good. I wouldn't sleep a wink with those things in the house."
Repetitions, awkward phrasings, explanations that seem to either drag out forever or skip ahead confusingly, unnatural dialogue – the writing never quite works as well as it could. It feels very much like a first draft. I have no idea if that's the fault of the author or the translator (or maybe it just sounded better in Icelandic), but there was something on nearly every page that I wished I could rewrite.
And yet. Like I said, I Remember You just works: the tension, the horror, and the mystery are all too powerful to be defeated by the writing. I haven't been this effectively scared by a book in years. Definitely recommended for horror fans... though I still wish I could do that rewrite first.
The Inheritor's Powder: A Tale of Arsenic, Murder, and the New Forensic Science by Sandra Hempel. Nonfiction that also splits its narrative, this time between the murder of George Bodle in 1833 England and the scientific test for detecting the presence of small amounts of arsenic that resulted.
George Bodle was an elderly and wealthy man who owned quite a lot of farmland and was a leading figure in his small town. One morning, he and four other members of his household fell violently ill after sharing a pot of coffee. The other four survived; George died. George's son and grandson promptly accused one another of poisoning him, presumably to get hold of the money and property they were due to inherit. The subsequent court case was a national sensation, followed closely in the newspapers.
Arsenic poisoning, however, looks a lot like food poisoning, cholera, and other common diseases of the time: stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea. There was no positive way to diagnose poisoning as opposed to disease, and no reliable scientific test to prove that arsenic was in a sample of food or drink. It was Bodle's death that inspired James Marsh, who testified as coroner during the trial, to invent a test that would be used in court cases for nearly 150 years.
The Inheritor's Powder isn't particularly faithful to either of these stories. Hempel has a habit of throwing in digressions on related and interesting trivia – other poisoning trials of the period; the use of arsenic to produce green dyes; medical education and prison conditions in early Victorian England; a proposed law banning women from buying arsenic, based on the assumption that they were more likely to be positioners. Which is not a complaint, because some of my favorite parts of the book came in these tangents. I was particularly fascinated by a section on the very first attempts to classify poisons – after all, how does one decide what counts as a poison? Is ground glass a poison? What about acid? Insect stings? Bites from a rabid dog? Are what we would now recognize as shellfish allergies caused by a mysterious poisonous substance that only affects some people? "Poison" seems like such a self-evident category, but it clearly wasn't at all for the first toxicologists!
Hempel's writing is shallower and more melodramatic than I expect from this genre, even ending one chapter with a set of ellipses: "It is also fatal in tiny doses, and in Britain in 1833 it was cheap and ridiculously easy to get hold of, a situation that resulted in no end of mischief..." I can almost hear the dun-dun-duuuun! sound-effect. Although I have to admit that, whatever its drawbacks, the style did make for a terrifically quick read.
Overall The Inheritor's Powder isn't the best Victorian era true-crime nonfiction I've ever read, but it's an entertaining and breezy, a bit like the very morbid beach read you never knew you needed.
