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2 out of 2 found this helpful: "The Aspern Papers"
Review: The Aspern Papers (Penguin Popular Classics)
 
Henry James wrote "The Aspern Papers" (I use quotations as one can hardly call a story of a mere 97 pages a novel) while living in Palazzo Barbaro, a "dilapidated old palace" (James, "The Aspern Papers") just down the Grand Canal from the Ponte dell'Accademia in Venice. His insights into back-canal-yet-"<i>comme-il-faut</i>" (James) Venice neighborhoods show themselves on numerous occasions in the story, and his knowledge of Venetian Italian also appears. The story is set against the rich brocade of the English speaking social scene in Risorgimento-era Venice, complete with gondolas still graced with <i>felzi</i>, everyone dining at Florian's, and a sense of imperious, upper-crust British entitlement, and is peopled with famous poets, singing gondoliers, "the help," and once-great now-immobile dames of English speaking continental society.
But it isn't the setting that makes the book a classic, it's the James-specific cerebral quality of the storytelling. Placed inside the head of a rather overeducated British man determined to place his hands on lost papers of the late poet Jeffrey Aspern, the reader quickly finds himself party to the overanalyzation of every meaningless conversation vis-à-vis his end goal. As with "The Turn of the Screw," another James classic, the protagonist develops a hysteria due to the mental and emotional climate of the story.
James creates in both novels a distinct tension which threatens to tear the storyline apart, coming to a head only at the end, in which something calamatous in the eyes of the protagonist occurs. Yet in "The Aspern Papers," it's the mounting cerebral hysteria that involves even the reader that sets this book apart. Drawing its audience into the plot through the reader's natural curiosity about what happens in a far more skillful and deft maneuver than any overt mystery novel, the end of "The Aspern Papers" leaves even the reader who disagrees with the protagonist's motives and actions feeling the very emotions James places in the heart of his main character. Skillfully created and executed with equal adroitness, "The Aspern Papers" is engrossing and absorbing; my only dissatisfaction with it is that I wished it had gone on longer.
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This is my first review, and any constructive criticism is always welcome. Thanks!
2005-12-16 20:34 | comment
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