|
|
Post by dem on Feb 29, 2008 22:29:37 GMT
Jim Shepard - Nosferatu In Love (Faber & Faber, 1998) blurb Nosferatu. Doesn't the name sound like the midnight call of a death bird? Beware of uttering it, or the pictures of life will turn to pale shadows, nightmares will rise up from the heart and nourish themselves on your blood.
Nosferatu was the first vampire film, whose images still haunt our consciousness. Its director, F. W. Murnau, was one of the founding fathers of cinema. In this dazzling new novel, we see him as a man living in despair and denial, 'at home in no house and no country', seeking escape from his stifling rural upbringing in the artistic circles and underground bars of Berlin, as a pilot during the First World War, and then as an early experimenter in the powerful, untried new artform — cinema.
Filming in Czechoslovakia, Murnau descends into the depths of his own nature and his obsession with Nosferatu, the hideous vampire who drains the life from the living. Like Nosferatu, he is cold and impenetrable, tormented by self-loathing, afraid of his terrible inhumaness. He feeds on himself and on those around him, haunted by the memory of his lover who died in the trenches, and by his continuing betrayal of that love.
Nosferatu in Love confirms Jim Shepard as one of America's most prodigiously talented writers, whose works are "so imaginative and mysterious", according to the New York Times, that "they take up permanent residence in the reader's memory".Yet another of the great as yet unread, and it's not strictly a novelisation, but this seemed as appropriate a place as any to post it. Chances are, this is not going to be very pulp, but read that blurb and - can you resist?
|
|
