Mary is very fond of Sir Edgar Swift. When she was a girl of nineteen and he a man of forty-three, he seemed an old man, but now when she is thirty and he is fifty-four, the difference doesn’t look so great. So when he proposes to her, she doesn’t say no at once.
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“King Solomon’s Carpet” is one of the books Ruth Rendell wrote as Barbara Vine. An award-winning book, too, but I didn’t like it much when I read it for the first time, which must have been about four years ago. I found the book depressing and put it back on the shelf at once.
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“The Painted Veil” can be justly tagged a love story, but it’s not quite a usual one. It goes much deeper into the psychology of everyone involved than it’s usually done in love stories – and it has, unfortunately, no happy end.
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I found this famous book in a local library a few days ago while attending the English Speaking Club there. Among all the controversy of recent days (Salinger suing the author of an unauthorized sequel of the book), I was naturally curious. Having read the book, I’m even more curious, and the main question I keep asking myself is, why is the book so famous and praised?
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Back to classical and well-known literature of the nineteenth century – truly the Golden Age of literature. Oscar Wilde’s only novel, into which he put all his genius, keeps fascinating generations of readers, because love and hate, moral and immoral deeds, purity and depravity, and good and bad influences are topics that don’t belong to any particular time – they will exist for as long as human beings trample on the surface of the Earth.
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“The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” could go under “Detective stories”, but I’ve decided to place it in “Psychological prose”, because to me its psychological side matters most.
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