I have not liked any of Henry James's books so far, so the best I can say for these stories is that they are short. James is fond of drawing out simple sentences into page-long run-ons that somehow manage to say even less than the simple sentence they probably derived from. The Turn of the Screw, the novella I decided I had to eventually actually read, that motivated my reading this collection, was supposed to be suspenseful. It had ghosts, creepy children, and a poor young lady almost all alone in an isolated country house. The ghosts were even, at least according to the lady, 'evil-intentioned'. Any momentum this story might have had from the ghosts and the creepy children was drained almost immediately by the storytelling style of the author. I did eventually find a way to approach this novella, though, that allowed me to almost enjoy it by the end- I decided to just assume the young lady governess narrating the tale was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. Thus the ghosts were not real, the children were not unnaturally creepy, and the only source of evil or unnaturalness was in the governess herself and her perception of her surroundings. And, when the boy dies at the end, he is not dead because he is no longer possessed, as she says, but because she has smothered him. A more modern reading perhaps, but it got me through the book and was actually an internally consistent reading. I highly recommend this approach if you are struggling with this story.
The other stories were even shorter, so easier to finish. James seems to like tragic deaths of children as a plot device and to cap off the ends of stories, and their deaths need not make much sense logically. The Tree of Knowledge seemed to be a bit of very timid homosexually oriented fiction, maybe, but so vague that if you get much of a plot out of it, you're doing really well. And the final story is really just a veiled attempt by James to answer reviewers' commentary on his writing.
Still not my favorite classic author, but at least these stories are shorter.
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I have not liked any of Henry James's books so far, so the best I can say for these stories is that they are short. James is fond of drawing out simple sentences into page-long run-ons that somehow manage to say even less than the simple sentence they probably derived from. The Turn of the Screw, the novella I decided I had to eventually actually read, that motivated my reading this collection, was supposed to be suspenseful. It had ghosts, creepy children, and a poor young lady almost all alone in an isolated country house. The ghosts were even, at least according to the lady, 'evil-intentioned'. Any momentum this story might have had from the ghosts and the creepy children was drained almost immediately by the storytelling style of the author. I did eventually find a way to approach this novella, though, that allowed me to almost enjoy it by the end- I decided to just assume the young lady governess narrating the tale was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. Thus the ghosts were not real, the children were not unnaturally creepy, and the only source of evil or unnaturalness was in the governess herself and her perception of her surroundings. And, when the boy dies at the end, he is not dead because he is no longer possessed, as she says, but because she has smothered him. A more modern reading perhaps, but it got me through the book and was actually an internally consistent reading. I highly recommend this approach if you are struggling with this story.
The other stories were even shorter, so easier to finish. James seems to like tragic deaths of children as a plot device and to cap off the ends of stories, and their deaths need not make much sense logically. The Tree of Knowledge seemed to be a bit of very timid homosexually oriented fiction, maybe, but so vague that if you get much of a plot out of it, you're doing really well. And the final story is really just a veiled attempt by James to answer reviewers' commentary on his writing.
Still not my favorite classic author, but at least these stories are shorter.
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