A Proliferation of Book Mail
Lately, I’ve been coming across book recommendations that have forced me to seek out the less travelled ways to order books including buying directly from overseas publishers and going through sites devoted to both new and secondhand rare books. That means that lately I’ve been getting a package a week in the mail loaded with those lovely bound magical stacks of paper that I cannot get enough of. I try to make sure I stay within my book-buying limits, but my lovely spouse groans a bit over the collection of tracking emails cluttering up the work inbox. I don’t like to delete any order emails from senders until I receive the package — but that can mean five emails per book and I can see how messages from work may get lost in that amount of book-related red tape.
Sorry, my love.
A Modern Gothic Story
Angela Tomaski’s The Infamous Gilberts was published just this year, but there’s a feeling to it that renders a much older feeling to its pages. Tomaski has managed to strike a very delicate balance between contemporary style and older structures and stories. The Infamous Gilberts is a story about the Gilbert family, but it is also the story of the house they lived in. A narrator, Maximus, guides the reader through the huge English manor, pointing out places in the many rooms that point to the many stories over the family’s history that unfolded in these opulent but eventually decaying surroundings.
I love a haunted house story, and though this isn’t a novel about actual ghosts (for the most part), it is a story about how human lives haunt the places they played out in and how families can fall into the same kind of decay as estates often do.
Style Carried Through
Tomaski has made use of very short chapters, and time that is sometimes linear and sometimes more fluid to create an off-kilter feeling of a story told from multiple angles. Though each chapter is basically a self-contained story, each one also has a complex place in the history of the Gilberts and all of the other stories the house contains. The dedication to this kind of style and leaning in to the intricacy of it is what made the book so readable and easy to get lost in. There’s a lot to chew on here, but it’s also a lovely spooky read for a weekend or a couple of evenings.
How Much is Too Much?
There are places where the writing strays into a bit of cliché, and there are definitely times when more story could be supplied or some elements subtracted to streamline the narrative. I especially found this most notable in the ending of book (which I will not spoil) which has to do with revealing something about the eldest son. While there were glimmers of it earlier, it felt like the revelation needed a bit more to be dealt with completely or at least to not seem as if it were placed there as a convenient way to explain complex behaviour at the end of a novel rapidly running out of pages. It needed more room to feel less trite.
That being said, the novel was still worth the read — for the narrative structure alone!
Bubastis and Butterflies
Bubastis has been doing much better on her medication, but I have been lamenting that I probably won’t be seeing another all-out run from her anymore. We called them ‘tabby thunders’ because she’s chonky enough that it feels like the house is shaking when she really gets going.
Last week she was in the backyard while I watching her and a cabbage butterfly happened to float by her nose. That was all Bubastis needed to take off into the grass at top speed, chasing this butterfly and falling miserably behind. I nearly cried to see her run so easily through the grass. Senior care can be hard, but moments like that give me hope that not all of it is.
