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Post by andydecker on May 7, 2019 8:11:22 GMT
While of the Fontana Ghost anthologies only appeared some odds and ends - like with van Thal's Pan Books - Robert Aickman got two translated collections of his work. These were even original collections, put together by the editor. Robert Aickman – Ringing the Changes (Dumont 1991, 262 pages) Content: The Hospice
The Same Dog
Ravissante
Meeting Mr. Millar
No Stronger than a Flower
Ringing the ChangesRobert Aickman - Sleepless (Dumont, 1992, 277 pages) Content: The Cicerones
Into the Woods
The Swords
The Schoolfriend
The Trains
The Next GladeDumont publishing, founded in 1956, became a successful publisher originally specialising on art books and very well done travel guides. Nowadays it is also literary fiction. Dumont's Library of the Phantastic was one of the first efforts to establish itself on the paperback market. It didn't last long, only 12 books. Translations were well done, the books were well produced, all had interesting afterwords by the series editor Frank Rainer Scheck. Covers are a bit subdued, on the tasteful and cautious side. Dumont was more successful with a line of classic crime novels. New and unabridged translations of writers like S.S.van Dine, Mary Roberts Rinehart, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen. First published in the same year als the Library, some of them were re-issed as ebooks. As an afterthought here is the complete program of the Library. Some of the selection may be of interest. No.1 Walerij Brjussow - Flaming Angel Ognenny angel, 1908, 441 pages No.2 Vernon Lee - Amour dure 4 stories, 204 pages No.3 Alexander Lernet-Holenia - Red Dream German original, 1939 ,181 pages No.4 Maurice Sandoz - Labyrinth Le Labyrinthe, 1941, 145 pages No.5 Edward Harold Visiak - Medusa Medusa, 1929, 244 pages No.6 Robert Aickman No.7 Claude Seignolle – Marie, the she-wolf Marie la louve, 1947, 216 pages No.8 John Meade Falkner – The Stradivari The Lost Stradivarius, 1895, 187 pages No.9 Hugh Walpole – The Killer and the slain The Killer and the Slain, 1942, 264 pages No.10 Arthur R. Ropes – Out of the abyss The Hole of the Pit, 1914,233 pages, with afterword by Richard Dalby No.11 Robert Aickman No.12 Thomas Ligotti – The Sect of the Idiot Selected tales |
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Post by jamesdoig on May 7, 2019 10:17:41 GMT
That's an impressive list of books - any idea how successful it was?
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on May 7, 2019 13:48:54 GMT
The Hospice The Same Dog Ravissante Meeting Mr. Millar No Stronger than a Flower Ringing the Changes With the exception of "Ringing the Changes" (and possibly "No Stronger Than a Flower," about which I remember nothing), that is a pretty hardcore introduction to Aickman. |
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Post by cauldronbrewer on May 7, 2019 17:41:15 GMT
The Hospice The Same Dog Ravissante Meeting Mr. Millar No Stronger than a Flower Ringing the Changes With the exception of "Ringing the Changes" (and possibly "No Stronger Than a Flower," about which I remember nothing), that is a pretty hardcore introduction to Aickman. "The Hospice" was my introduction to Aickman, and that worked out fine for me. Apart from "Ringing the Changes," however, the rest of the lineup does look rather rugged. I like the covers. |
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Post by andydecker on May 8, 2019 14:01:46 GMT
That's an impressive list of books - any idea how successful it was? No. But as it just lasted two years I don't think it was very successful. Even if a lot of these books must have been rather cheap concernining the foreign-rights, I can't imagine they broke more than even. It was the sort of publisher which wasn't even on the radar of genre-readers. Also at the time the (modest) horror-boom was as good as over. If I remember correctly I bought the three books I own of this imprint in a one of those second-hand chain-booksstores which existed at the time. The whole stock of these was non-sold printings, especially art-books, coffee-table-books (I wonder why never anybody did this book about coffee-table-books  ) or stuff like Taschen did. But I could be wrong, of course. Novels like "Castle of Otranto" are avaiable translated in print and not as a book on demand, the last "new and better" translation of Dracula is six years old. So there must be a small market for these classics. With the exception of "Ringing the Changes" (and possibly "No Stronger Than a Flower," about which I remember nothing), that is a pretty hardcore introduction to Aickman. I pulled this from the shelves to give it another try. Maybe I will discover Aickman this time. Twice I shrugged and gave up. Of course sometimes I think writers like him or Ramsey Campbell should be read in the original only. Some translations don't catch the nuances on which such writers often seem to depend. It makes them a challenge. [/quote] |
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Post by andydecker on Apr 13, 2020 10:30:09 GMT
I finally finished "Glockengeläut", the first one I listed.
Maybe it is an age-thing. I still don't "get" this stories, as I don't "get" a lot of Ramsey Campbell, but in Aickman's case this is different. At least I understand - in most cases - what actually happens on the page. It is not the plot, it is the atmosphere and the impression of the tale, which in some cases I found fascinating. The little things, which I assume make some readers feeling uncomfortable. It still worked even if this was a translation, and I assume that nuances which seldom survive a translation are terrible important with Aickman's work.
It is hard to understand most of the characters. For instance the guy from No stronger than a Flower I can't get into. One of those repressed males whose relation to woman is just terrible. The "she puts on make-up, OMG, what will our friends think" is off-putting. I have no doubt that there were enough of the type at the time of the story's genesis, but where is the genre-element? This is one of the tales which ending I didn't understand. So she leaves him. What was the point? His mounting obsession with her, which was creepy? Conditioned by too many horror stories I expected something horrifying at the end, which of course didn't occur. But for a few pages this sad excuse for a partner became relatable.
While I liked the atmosphere in Ravissante and Meeting Mr Miller, I thought them too rambling and too long. Especially "Mr Miller" I thought an excercise in hypocricy, which was the reason why I thought it tiresome. The narrator is editing "pornographic" writings, which I guess at the time was nothing other than the usual spicy story type, and has an affair with a married woman, but still can muster indignation about Mr Miller with his nightly parties with supposed gangsters and prostitutes. Again, what was the point of the story? Or is the hypocricy the point and the ending of suicide and the "evil house" just window-dressing?
The same Dog and Ringing the Changes were the most straight forward genre-tales. The quite insightful afterword in this edition emphasized how Ringing the Changes was about the destruction of love, which even I understood at the end of the story, as it for once was spelled out by the writer. But the supernatural atmosphere and the scenario worked well in this case. I was a bit surprised how much The same dog reminded me of Wagner's Sticks in parts.
I have the impression that Aickman is not - or less, six stories don't tell much about a writer - about interesting plots or clever ghost tales, but about a depressing world-view and constant alienation. While this is okay, I could understand that many readers find this not very appealing.
Or maybe I still get it wrong. Always a good possibility.
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peedeel
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 61
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Post by peedeel on Apr 14, 2020 7:23:38 GMT
"I have the impression that Aickman is not - or less, six stories don't tell much about a writer - about interesting plots or clever ghost tales, but about a depressing world-view and constant alienation. While this is okay, I could understand that many readers find this not very appealing.
Or maybe I still get it wrong. Always a good possibility."
The ongoing enigma that was Robert Aickman:
Peter Straub wrote in 1988,
“After the shock of the sheer strangeness fades away, we begin to see how the facts of the stories appear to grow out of the protagonists’ fears and desires, and how the illogic and terror surrounding them is their own, far more accurately and disturbingly than in any conventional horror story. The Trains is a perfect story of this type, and The Inner Room is even better, one of Aickman’s most startling and beautiful demonstrations of the power over us of what we do not quite grasp about ourselves and our lives.”
Chris Power wrote in 2015,
Aickman nearly always refuses to provide a neat conclusion. When he does, as in The Waiting Room (1964) and The Wine-Dark Sea (1966), the results are disappointing. “In the end”, reads the epigraph to his 1975 collection, Cold Hand in Mine, “it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation…”
Jim Rockhill wrote,
Everyone’s response to fiction or any other work of art is dependent in varying degrees upon both the work itself and individual experience. This is particularly true of one's response to the strange tales of Robert Aickman, where the deeply personal, irrational response to the images and their conjunction within the tale is as important as the objective, rational reading of Aickman's elegant prose.
Neil Gaiman wrote in 2014,
“Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I’m not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully.”
Ian Smith wrote in 2015,
“However, for me, the best story in The Wine-Dark Sea is The Inner Room, which is about a haunted doll’s house. Now haunted doll’s houses have appeared in many scary stories over the years, most famously in one written by M.R. James called – surprise! – The Haunted Doll’s House. But Aickman infuses The Inner Room with a wry, sad humour. Its climax, on the other hand, is unexpectedly and phantasmagorically weird and reminds me a little of the fiction of Angela Carter.”
James Michael Rogers wrote in 2001,
Part of the torture, and part of the fun, in reading Aickman is in trying to find these mythic, literary, and historical allusions.
Robert Aickman wrote (in the introduction to The Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories),
"Knowledge lies within us. It is to be found nowhere else. It is a matter of delight and of inaccessible horizons, rather than of question and answer. Truth can be found only through the imagination, and those whose imaginations have been cramped with answers will never find it."
Some years ago Barbara Rodan said to me that she didn’t believe there was any ‘overall meaning’ to Aickman’s work; the stories simply are, and interpretation is pointless. This may well be a correct, but certainly the search for meaning is fascinating.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Apr 14, 2020 18:49:55 GMT
I still don't "get" this stories There is nothing to "get," as far as I am concerned. You either enjoy Aickman or you do not. I happen to enjoy much, though certainly not all (THE MODEL comes to mind), of his work a lot. There is no reason everybody should. |
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Post by Knygathin on Apr 15, 2020 12:08:30 GMT
"No Stronger Than a Flower" seems a favorite to debate over here in the Vault. So I decided to read it, to see if I can understand any of it, for whatever that's worth.
Well, now I have read it. I liked it. Very good. Although not much of a story, more a study of behavior. I don't think there is much hidden meaning to understand beyond what is written. It is about the difficulties in the communication (conscious and subconscious, spoken and unspoken) between man and woman, of reaching mutual understanding, and the evils and traps lurking in its tangled psychological intricacies. He didn't know how to treat a woman, and got what he deserved. There is the drama.
If there is any supernatural element in it at all, I think it would be her nails growing pointed (unless she lied about that, and intentionally filed them so) - a symbol of her growing frustration and anger.
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Post by ramseycampbell on Apr 15, 2020 12:22:19 GMT
Two possible directions to take when reading Robert's tales: he himself said he didn't regard them as fantasy (except in terms of exaggeration to emphasise a point), while Joel Lane thought he was simply transcribing his view of and experience of the world.
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Post by Shrink Proof on Apr 15, 2020 18:58:25 GMT
As the above posts have shown, Aickman's writing is intriguing stuff. The unsung hero in all of this is the translator. To be able to render literature in another language such that not only the plot, but also the feeling/atmosphere of it comes through is a mighty skill. It is little short of scandalous that the efforts of literary translators often go unrecognised.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Apr 15, 2020 19:19:40 GMT
he himself said he didn't regard them as fantasy (except in terms of exaggeration to emphasise a point) I have a feeling he may also have been fond of making outrageous statements, but I could be wrong. |
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Post by dem on Apr 15, 2020 19:41:28 GMT
Two possible directions to take when reading Robert's tales: he himself said he didn't regard them as fantasy (except in terms of exaggeration to emphasise a point), while Joel Lane thought he was simply transcribing his view of and experience of the world. I remember Joel wrote a particularly brilliant analysis/ interpretation of The Hospice - at least, I thought so. Am pretty sure it was on your Knibbworld message board. |
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Post by Knygathin on Apr 16, 2020 8:59:56 GMT
As the above posts have shown, Aickman's writing is intriguing stuff. ... I think much of Aickman's writing deals with extremely unpleasant subjects concerning psychological illness. There is a social realism to it, which is strengthened by the dreamlike hallucinary details. But most "normal" people can't deal with that, or such interpretations, it is too painful and miserable to look at. They merely want horror fiction as fun entertainment. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Apr 16, 2020 9:03:56 GMT
As the above posts have shown, Aickman's writing is intriguing stuff. ... I think much of Aickman's writing deals with extremely unpleasant subjects concerning psychological illness. There is a social realism to it, which is strengthened by the dreamlike hallucinary details. But most "normal" people can't deal with that, or such interpretations, it is too painful and miserable to look at. They merely want horror fiction as fun entertainment. I think Aickman is fun entertainment. |
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) or stuff like Taschen did. 
