We meet her trudging through a snowdrift, “her neat coat belted, as colorless as she is, nine years worn.” Determinedly drab, she is allergic to any form of artifice or titivation. An Englishwoman living in Prague, she works as a translator - not of novels but of operating instructions for power tools. Helen Franklin is 42, and as stolid as they come.
But if there were ever a genre that could comfortably embody these qualities, that could be so unapologetically lush and overwrought, it is the Gothic novel - which is “Melmoth” to its core, from its filigreed sentences to its twisty, supernatural plot.ĭid your heart sink at “supernatural”? Is the “supernatural” decidedly not for you? Trust that no one would be more stalwartly at your side than this novel’s protagonist. How forced it feels in comparison, how kitschy. Every time I think of the second, I recoil. Every time I think of that first image, I get a small rush from the transubstantiation of moonlight into milk. To speak of Perry’s novel, inspired by a 19th-century Irish story, “Melmoth the Wanderer,” means to to reckon first with its language - thick, painterly, sometimes unwieldy. “Overhead the low clouds split, and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk out on the river.” And: “The moon freshly polished: an opal on a bit of velvet.”
Here are two descriptions of the moon, from Sarah Perry’s new novel, “Melmoth”:
0 kommentar(er)
