The Thirteenth Tale
Ratings205
Average rating3.8
This was an interesting little mystery. It's been a while since I finished it. If I finished it it can't be all bad.
Ми з цією книгою не зійшлись. Можливо, якби я прочитала її раніше, коли була більш impressionable, це склалось трохи по іншому. Але зараз для мене це тільки велика загадку, чому цю книгу так рекомендували всім і з будь якого приводу.
Я не відчувала емоційної прив'язаності до жодного з героїв, більшість з них викликали в мене тільки різні ступені роздратування. Закрученість стилю авторки з одного боку перешкоджала сюжету, а з іншої хоч якось мене розважала своєю гіперболізованістю.
Загалом, я дуже сильно відчувала нестачу одного дуже важливого персонажа - психіатра, який би поговорив з кожним з героїв.
Книгу читала для книжкового клубу і це єдине, що змусило мене дочитати. Зате обговорення було класним))
When I read, sometimes I can completely loose myself, I can read for an hour or two without distraction and devour 50 or 60 pages. However, sometimes I can't focus and before I know it, I am trying to list all the Girls Aloud singles in alphabetical order, or do I have the correct ingredients for pineapple upside down cake or quite simply, where is the dog!! That's what it was like reading this book, I did love it. It's beautifully written, I loved the ambiguity of time, at the end everything fitted into place nicely and I did get a little teary. It just lost me in places and I was a bit bored in the middle.
I picked this up because I adore the cover and the classic literature it references. However, in the end, I think it just wasn't really my genre (more contemporary fiction, whereas I prefer mystery these days). As a writer I can appreciate the voice of the narrative, but as a reader it felt a little pretentiously opaque rather than nostalgic . . . maybe I'm too removed from the author's world. The prose was lovely, certainly, but not something that made me personally love the characters or feel welcomed into the story: it was more something to be admired. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, particularly if you love contemporary lit and have a long afternoon ahead of you!
The Thirteenth Tale is a Gothic mystery, full of dark atmosphere and family shadows.
I wasn't sure what to expect when I started this one, but I've had it on my shelf for a while now and decided it was time to pick it up.
The pace is very slow for this one, and I'm sure that will put off a lot of readers. For me, it was perfect for the style of writing and for the underlying story. This was not meant to be fast, or even medium-paced.
The mystery surrounding the author, Vida Winter, and her story of beginnings, middles and endings was done very well. I did not expect the conclusion that came at the end.
Overall, a very dark and enjoyable read and one I recommend.
3.5 stars
Most of the book I would give 3-3.5 stars. It was slow going but felt intense. The ending kept me hooked and deserved 4 stars.
Prompt #16 from 2020 Popsugar Challenge: A book that has a book on the cover.
Book: The Thirteenth Tale Author: Diane Setterfield Genre: gothic suspense Dates Read: 02/25/2021-03/01/2021 Format: Audiobook - Hoopla Other prompts: fresh starts, book about an artist (writer x2) Rating:
“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy...“A book about love, secrets and ghosts.When the story of Margaret began so similar to us those who find joy in books, you get the feel that you are gonna enjoy the read, and i did. Gothic literature has never been my kind of reads, but I liked this one (surprisingly). As interesting as it was, for me, the ending wasn't up to the mark. Although the puzzle was complete, it still felt like some pieces were missing.
This book took me a while to read, but now that I finally finished it, I'm happy I stayed with it. From the beginning, I couldn't predict how I would end up feeling about this one. Even after finishing, it is still hard for me to rate it. I like so much about it, yet at the same time I struggled with some parts of it. I settled on a rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars.
I will begin with what I like about the book. The writing is incredible. The author's style is very literary and reminds me of great writers I have studied. It felt almost like I was reading a Victorian novel. The atmosphere of the story is also a plus. The moody, Gothic feel of the novel is very well done. It is reminiscent of the writings of the Romantic period, which is my favorite literary period. The characters are interesting and mysterious, and I wanted to know more about their pasts. There is a bit of twist as the reader nears the end of the tale, which is always fun in a book. The book also deals with the idea of truth in storytelling, which is intriguing.
It is harder to explain what I do not like about the book. The whole “twin” relationship that is explored in the novel bothered me at times. There is a bit too much emphasis on it for my liking. The main character's obsession with her sister became annoying to me. I also found that some characters, like Charles, were not developed enough. In addition, the pace of the story is too slow at some points. This made it hard to stick with the book early on.
I am glad that I did continue reading this book. In the end, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone that enjoys a dark, moody read.
I enjoyed the book but it was very slow moving for me - I felt the pace need to be a bit faster and maybe the book could have been shorter. The overall story was good and I loved how books felt like part of the setting.
Starts off very strong, but almost collapses in the middle. Mostly redeems itself at the finish. All the elements of a great Victorian gothic, but in a jumble.
Fragments that caught my attention:
“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”
I haven't read many mystery novels, but this one caught my eye. The premise sounded interesting and other bibliophiles said that it was the type of book that book lovers would like. I wasn't disappointed. Not only was the mystery really good and characters memorable, The Thirteenth Tale feels like a gothic romance tribute to stories and book lovers, except without the romance...if that makes any sense. It's eerie and atmospheric and managed to keep me interested in the outcome all the way through. There were no mid-book lags and each piece of the puzzle comes together quite neatly, if kind of sadly at the end. I really loved the many lines about reading, books and stories peppered throughout, some lines will definitely go down in my all time favourite book quotes, they were written so elegantly. Well done novel that I thoroughly enjoyed and would recommend for anyone who enjoys a good creepy mystery and has a love for well-told stories.
''We live like latecomers at the theatre; we must catch up as best we can, dividing the beginning from the shape of later events.''
The Thirteenth Tale had been ‘‘waiting'' in my TBR list for almost two years, before I finally decided to start reading it. It proved to be a rare bibliophile's experience.
In the Gothic Literature group October Reading and in a recent discussion with a friend in Goodreads, I described Diane Setterfield's novel as foreboding. Each scene, each sentence is a creation of art, each detail so important, nothing is wasted. Each page leads to the shocking final twist, although some of the twists in the middle of the book were a bit predictable, if you paid attention. I will not go into any detail of the plot, because it is hard to do so without falling into the trap of spoiling something, but I can say that the lover of books will find a treasure of references. The most prominent reference is Jane Eyre (and rightfully so), with Wuthering Heights and The Woman in White following closely. Why? Foreboding houses, problematic narrators, troubled heroines, and all the sins and faults of the past that go on haunting families and places. Even Sherlock Holmes gets an honourable mention, since there are some riddles that require answers as there are some characters that desire truth and others that seek absolution.
For some reason, Miss Winter reminds me of a modern Miss Havisham, from the first glimpse of her through the eyes of Margaret Lea, the young amateur biographer. Margaret is a very interesting character that stands as equal to the troubled Vida. She is sensitive, almost fragile, but strong at the same and so determined to exorcise her own demons.
The Thirteenth Tale has all the characteristics of a heavy cloud before the storm. It is a classic, a haunting tale, its prose elegant and poetic. A tale that shows us that the most dangerous ghosts exist not in a world beyond, but fully in our own...
The genre for this book is gothic novel. It was my mother's favorite kind of book. Because I didn't want to go against my mom, and because it was at least a way to have books to read, I read a plethora of gothic novels as a teen. In fact, it was just about the only sort of story I read.
So lots of elements of this story were familiar to me: the governess who comes to live with a family, a remote castle-like home, the mists of the moors, a silent bachelor, strange servants, possible ghosts, mysterious death, the elevated language.
The gothic elements put me off a bit because of overfamiliarity; that won't happen to you, I imagine, so set that aside. It's related, for the most part, as if the various characters are telling the stories of their lives, talking right to the reader, and that's quite appealing and quite novel. The sense of mystery and all the questions in my head kept me reading along at a brisk pace.
It was a satisfying book.
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
A good story is always more darling than a broken piece of truth.
There is something about words. In expert words, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves round your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
Returning to myself, I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence.
As famous for her secrets as for her stories, she was a perfect mystery.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
I'd expected the world to give up its childlike and familiar appearance to show me its secret, adult side. Instead, cloaked in my new independence, I felt younger than ever.
For me, to see is to read.
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings?
One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people,
I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born... Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.
The incendiary magic she possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly enough.
Oh! The outrageous sensation of crumpled paper; words gone wild, flying in all directions, senseless. My heart broke.
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.
I don't know why I waited this long to read this one. Captivating story. Some parts were a bit too slow but overall it was a great read. Lots of family secrets hidden, loss of a loved one and to finally have the truth revealed. Worth reading!
The premise of the book sounds interesting. It has nearly everything. A family secret, a ghost, twins, a mystery, a fire. Unfortunately the book becomes clogged with too much. The characters all start to blend. They appear for a handful of pages, then dissappear. When they reappear you're left struggling to remember who is who. At first I tried to separate the characters by what they did, the gardener, the twins. then the characters with those titles kept multiplying. Honestly, a book does not need more than 1 set of twins as main characters In a book. It became so confusing that I kept having to give up or flip back. It was like a sink full of dirty dishes and food scraps on thanksgiving night. There were thing everywhere. Cleaning the dishes should have been the main focus. Instead, in this book, the author decided to ignore the dishes and try to identify all the floating food scraps.
This tale within a tale had me so engrossed I just lost four days of my nonworking life, and I was glad to be there. Fabulous. This tale of writer who is interviewing another writer about the “true” story of her life had me enchanted and on the seat of my chair just waiting to find out what really happened. Good read.
I read this after following a lead on Olivia Coleman when we finished watching Broadchurch. I saw that she was to be in a televised version with Vanessa Redgrave. The story sounded intriguing so I downloaded the Audible version and made it my penultimate book for the 25-book challenge on Goodreads.
It started out very well indeed. In fact, rarely am I ever drawn into an audiobook quite so quickly. It was read by Jenny Agutter and she did a marvellous job of hooking me right away. As the tale progressed however, I found myself becoming less and less enchanted, so it gradually went down from five to four and ended up with three stars. It seemed to be trying hard to be literature in the style of Daphne du Maurier, and while it got close, the plot had too flimsy of an ending.
The TV adaptation was on the same day that I finished the book, but I didn't know until half an hour after it had started, so we saved it to watch on new year's eve. It was reasonably entertaining, but I feel that the two great performers weren't given the space to show us what they can really do. Shame.
I was really excited to read this book because someone told that it was great and I thought that this could renew my love for books but ir wasn't. It was pretty interesting at the beginning but then... Was awful and extremely boring. It's all about Miss Winter's life and the thoughts of Margaret Lea. But her thoughts are boring, full of fear and strange ghosts that don't exist.And the life of Miss Winter is conpletely weird and the main characters as Charlie and Isabella are pyschotic and maniac, also the twins are... Just freaks.
I really wanted to like this book but unfortunately I couldn't. The only thing that I liked was some interesting quotes that I've found.
You know how the mood of some books rub off on you? This one did that to me, but in a not so great way. There's just so much loss and freaking sadness. I was quiet and sad for two days after I finished it. I may be weird... but my mood is always affected by the books I'm reading.
This is the story of Adeline and Emmeline Angelfield, two very unique twins, told from the point of view of Vida Winter (a well-known and secretive writer on her death bed). The twins and their family live a secluded life and are an eerie mystery until now. It is well known that no one knows the truth about Vida Winter's life, and she has chosen Margaret Lea (also a twin) as the author of her story.
Throughout the entire book, the point of view switches between Vida and Margaret. You come to understand the story through Vida, and you come to understand Vida's true nature through Margaret. This story is beautifully crafted. Diane Setterfield intricately weaves words and creates an ominous tone that I love. You really come to see the beauty of reading and stories to connect people.
I was really engrossed at the beginning of the story. It starts off with just the right amount of delicious creep. Then it just kept getting sad, and distraught, and then almost hopeless. It slowed down some, and then picked back up after the twist at the end. I definitely didn't see the twist coming, it was so out of the blue that it felt disconnected.
The story centers on the bond of family and the ability to let go. It is beautifully tied up at the end (but in a sad way...)
But, the literary amazingness of this author is to die for...
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
If not for the disconnect I felt about the plot, I would give this book a higher rating. I would definitely read Diane Setterfield again.