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Post by andydecker on Apr 19, 2020 20:19:49 GMT
I have to confess that I never even knew he existed before reading this. ...
Please read the short-story "The Travelling Grave", and come back and give us your impression report. Well, I read it. Twice in some parts. I am lost. What IS this device? A coffin which crushes a corpse? A woodchipper? To what purpose?
The rest was at first amusing in a kind of Bertie Wooster way, but he lost me when they were playing hide and seek. Huh? I read the next one in this collection Feet Foremost and couldn't muster much interest after a few pages.
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Post by Knygathin on Apr 20, 2020 13:42:53 GMT
Please read the short-story "The Travelling Grave", and come back and give us your impression report. Well, I read it. Twice in some parts. I am lost. What IS this device? A coffin which crushes a corpse? A woodchipper? To what purpose?
The rest was at first amusing in a kind of Bertie Wooster way, but he lost me when they were playing hide and seek. Huh? I read the next one in this collection Feet Foremost and couldn't muster much interest after a few pages.
Sorry, it was not my intention to waste your time. Funny how differently people take to reading the same story. "The Travelling Grave" is one of my own very favorite discoveries over the last 20 years. It is a surrealistic, dreamlike hallucination. I take it that the coffin device is an elaborate, bizarre, and somewhat supernatural complete murdering tool, that also buries and effectively hides the victims under the parquet floor (although it slightly flunks by the end of the story). My favorite scene is when it crawls around like a crab, moving in unpredictable directions. That gives me shivers. And the final scene of course - it takes the grand prize.
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Post by humgoo on Apr 20, 2020 16:43:01 GMT
Well, I read it. Twice in some parts. I am lost. What IS this device? A coffin which crushes a corpse? A woodchipper? To what purpose? And you can imagine how baffled the readers of a certain book called The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories were, which begins with this particular story (after a most pretentiousliterary introduction).
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Post by helrunar on Apr 20, 2020 17:05:33 GMT
It's fascinating to me how much difference there can be in how various people respond, or fail to respond, to a story. (I haven't read the story by LP Hartley under discussion.)
When I was reading a couple of the Lady Asquith Ghost Book volumes a few months ago, I was really struck by a couple of instances where other Vault residents raved about a particular tale--I'd read it, and fail to find much at all to pique my interest. There were other tales that seemed to have attracted very little notice at all, but they really rang my chimes, often because of specifics of character and atmosphere which tend to be what I look for at this point in my life, in a yarn.
I do think it's a good thing that human taste is so variable. And it's why, if I had more of an ideological bent, I'd be flatly opposed to all these never ending bloody 10, 20, 50, 100 "greatest ever" blah-blah blather lists. I do see that they provide harmless entertainment for those who compile the lists, and the numerous people who take pleasure in disagreeing or fiddling with the order or specificity of entries. To each their own.
cheers, Hel
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Post by andydecker on Apr 21, 2020 7:30:31 GMT
Well, I read it. Twice in some parts. I am lost. What IS this device? A coffin which crushes a corpse? A woodchipper? To what purpose? And you can imagine how baffled the readers of a certain book called The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories were, which begins with this particular story (after a most pretentiousliterary introduction). Indeed. I looked the content up, and maybe the Blackwood would have been a bit easier to digest. Thanks for the comments. After reading this I guess from now on I will see those tales of weekends-in-the-country-with-the-idle-rich with other eyes
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 5, 2022 7:25:30 GMT
A VISITOR FROM DOWN UNDER by L.P. Hartley
The ghost story of retribution that has coincidence as a character and, from the earlier long arm, the two most frightening elbow-moments perhaps in the whole of literature.….
“And there, sure enough, it was: a long dead bough, bare in patches where the bark had peeled off, and crooked in the middle like an elbow. […] …leaning forward his whole length he seized the bough at the elbow joint and strained it away from him. As it cracked he toppled over and the shroud came rushing upwards. . . .”
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 6, 2022 9:31:30 GMT
A VISITOR FROM DOWN UNDER by L.P. Hartley The ghost story of retribution that has coincidence as a character and, from the earlier long arm, the two most frightening elbow-moments perhaps in the whole of literature.…. “And there, sure enough, it was: a long dead bough, bare in patches where the bark had peeled off, and crooked in the middle like an elbow. […] …leaning forward his whole length he seized the bough at the elbow joint and strained it away from him. As it cracked he toppled over and the shroud came rushing upwards. . . .” Hartley has the disarming strangeness of Aickman, I feel. My review of THREE, OR FOUR, FOR DINNER: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/the-travelling-grave-and-other-stories-by-l-p-hartley/#comment-25179
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 13, 2022 17:02:46 GMT
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Aug 13, 2022 17:46:43 GMT
Could you give us an idea of its dimensions, perhaps by putting Julian Assange next to it? If it is of normal height it looks no bigger than the Tartarus volume of just his ghost stories. Or is the type abnormally small?
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 14, 2022 7:08:35 GMT
Could you give us an idea of its dimensions, perhaps by putting Julian Assange next to it? If it is of normal height it looks no bigger than the Tartarus volume of just his ghost stories. Or is the type abnormally small? It’s over 750 pages, smallish print, thick, very heavy, but probably the height and width of the front cover being about that of a Tartarean hardback. Not sure about Assange.
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Post by helrunar on Aug 14, 2022 17:38:31 GMT
Interesting ruminations on these stories. It was nice to see photos of you in Venice on the notes about the story involving a delayed or absent dinner guest.
I re-read Hartley's biographical note on a popular online encyclopaedia and it was amusing to read that Lady Cynthia Asquith was so irritated with Hartley on one occasion that she served him vinegar instead of the cocktail he was supposed to get. The two were friends, but there were tensions, it would seem.
The L stood for Leslie, named after Sir Leslie Stephens, whose daughter Virginia did not approve of Hartley's "shabby novels."
Thanks to all this, I just ordered Hartley's early 70s "homosexual novel" The Harness Room from a bookshop up in Portland, Maine, I was able to visit last June on a field trip. I'm quite curious to read it. Of course it is off topic for the Vault.
cheers, Hel.
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 14, 2022 18:28:33 GMT
I re-read Hartley's biographical note on a popular online encyclopaedia and it was amusing to read that Lady Cynthia Asquith was so irritated with Hartley on one occasion that she served him vinegar instead of the cocktail he was supposed to get. The two were friends, but there were tensions, it would seem. I am pleased they were not Poles apart! Thanks for your Hartley tidbits. Des
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Post by Knygathin on Aug 21, 2022 16:20:53 GMT
Off topic, ... but there was a brief exchange of ideas earlier in this thread about writing or not writing, being an author or not being an author.
What is the greatest thing about being an author? I should think (besides immersing into creativity, fantasy make-believe, and rooting into various existential issues), it seems to me that instead of hating, shouting, shaking with indignation, sputtering and making a fool of oneself, revenging and thrashing people in real life, with all its negative consequences, one can have the joy of doing all this in the fictional world. Killing off the bastards inside the book. A safe release from pressure and frustration. A relief. Sort of what L. P. Hartley does in "The Travelling Grave".
Any thoughts on this, or objections?
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 31, 2022 10:27:16 GMT
FALL IN AT THE DOUBLE a ghost story by L.P. Hartley
“…written, printed rather. White over white, very hard to decipher….”
I once lived in a house where the floorboards of the stairs had been worn down, and I was told this was due to soldiers, billeted in my house during the war, walking up and down on the then bare boards in their army boots! So imagine my frisson at this unmitigated ghost story wherein similar conditions prevailed! And I loved the play on words with the title, and the oblique circumstances that happened to Philip, the central character, and the ambiguity of his factotum’s intentions at the end, soon after Philip seeing “only the moon shining as innocently as that de-virginated satellite can shine.” (This story was first published in 1970)
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Post by helrunar on Sept 1, 2022 21:07:15 GMT
I've started reading an electronic edition of this collection. The most attractive element for me thus far (and I am at best an idiosyncratic reader) is Hartley's narrative voice. The desert-dry, implicit wit is quite the breath of fresh air in this 21st century of "dumb and dumberer."
Reading "Podolo," and now in the midst of the one about two Brits on their way in a gondola to have dinner with one of the many Counts of Venice when they fish a corpse out of the lagoon, I find myself wondering how any English-speaking tourists (I include Americans, obviously) survive longer than a single afternoon when visiting Venice. It all makes me think of an English woman who exclaims in one of Simon Raven's novels "Venice is suppurating." And it's well furnished in corpses and monstrosities to live up to that formidable adjective.
H.
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