Book Thirty-Four - Rebecca - Part Four

Daphne du Maurier
From dumaurier.org

Daphne, you ingenious sneaky little thing! This story has as many twists and turns as the drive to Manderlay. When I finished it I had to go back to the beginning again.

Rebecca is a story of love, trust, friendship, betrayal, lust, loneliness, kindness, impulsiveness, and offers quite the example against putting all your eggs in one man, er, basket. It is also one of those books in which I kept looking down at the page numbers toward the end and thinking, there's no way she can wrap this up before the end of the book! There isn't time! I knew there wasn't a sequel so the novel had to end but I didn't see how it could. And du Maurier, master of description, gives us only two lines of description at the end. Brilliant.

The movie is next up in my Netflix queue. Directed by Hitchcock, it stars Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Netflix anticipates it is a 3.8 (out of 4) for me. Can't wait!

Guess how we're meant to feel about this character

Random question: in the US we call a party at which everyone comes dressed as someone else a costume party. In the UK this is called a fancy dress party. Why is that? If you come dressed as a pirate you're probably not fancy, now are you?

Book Thirty-Four - Rebecca - Part Three

No spoilers, but a certain someone reminds me of the Cloris Leachman character in High Anxiety.

Book Thirty-Four - Rebecca - Part Two

Daphne DuMarier's writing is intoxicating and inviting. I feel as if I am present in the exotic locations. And she's got something else right, too -

They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten...

I'm not sure how often these days that the age is twenty-one; the book was first published in 1938. These days we're, like, allowed outside without a chaperone and stuff and so we mature faster.

I especially appreciate the notion of a young person as a delicate fruit or flower "easily bruised," with words which are "barbed," like a medieval weapon hurled by an enemy. Spot on, that's what Daphne is.

Book Thirty-Four - Rebecca

Though I haven't read this book before, I am somewhat familiar with it. I saw a sketch on the Carol Burnett Show about it and I just found that sketch on You Tube.