4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sinister, spellbinding, suspenseful, and very hard to put down!, October 12, 2006
Turn of the Screw may be the best haunting story I've ever come across. James is masterful in his unfolding of the tale. His quiet, subtly restrained manner in which he inspires a sense of discomfort and unease in the reader. This story was 'just right', in that everything felt natural and in-character. There was no abruptness, no sense of 'hmmm, page 100 already? Better wrap this up!', no Scooby-Doo sort of ending. He figuratively turns the screw on the reader, by never easing up the tension of the story. Instead, he slowly increases the feeling of dread.
I have not yet read "In the Cage", but eventually plan to. The first story alone made it well worth the purchase price.
The one thing I didn't like was the footnotes. The person who wrote the footnotes should be repeatedly and stingingly slapped with the flat open palm of someone's hand (I'll volunteer for the job). If you have any background in English literature (i.e., you read and understood the Brontes, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens fairly easily), don't bother with looking them up. You'll be annoyed with the time you've wasted cutting out of the story and flipping to the back, just to see something painfully obvious explained out. If you can't derive most of the context of the stuff that's footnoted, just from reading the book, chances are you're not really going to enjoy this book anyway.
That being said, this book still gets five stars from me because I like the fonts and the paper Modern Classics Library uses. I have a number of their books, the bindings seem to hold pretty well, and the cover usually has a tasteful piece of art that usually suits the story inside.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Demons of the Mind & Manor, September 16, 2011
This review is from: The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)
Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw' is the notorious supernatural novella (1898) that is almost as famous for the many interpretations of its 'ghosts' (are they merely the products of the female protagonist's sexual and emotional repressions?) as for the story itself.
In 1945, American critic Edmund Wilson published a long, creatively successful, and influential essay outlining why he believed the governess at the center of the story was imagining apparitions where there were none. Later, when James' diaries came to light, Wilson publicly conceded the point, since the dairies made it clear that James had indeed intended a straight-forward ghost story with actual spiritual presences.
'The Turn of the Screw' is fairly engrossing but overlong and overwritten. James' sentence structure is often highly eccentric, and too many sentences seem to be about absolutely nothing at all (as Camille Paglia has stated, no major American writer wrote as many bad and ponderous passages as James did in his many novels).
The story has a proper young woman of nineteen taking her first job as a governess in an isolated manor house ("the place, with its grey sky and withered garlands, it bared space and scattered dead leaves..."), where she is assisted by competent longtime housekeeper Mrs. Grose. Her two charges, Miles and Flora, are delightful, beautiful little children of calm manner and excellent disposition.
Within a week of her arrival, the governess begins to notice a strange man about the house and grounds, one who stares at her rather brazenly. Questioning Mrs. Grose, she learns that the figure resembles Quint, a 'menial' employee who recently died just outside the grounds of the estate. Then the governess notices a female figure in black as well, one who corresponds in appearance to Miss Jessel, the previous governess, also recently deceased. And Miles, it seems, has just been expelled from the public school he attends without specific explanation.
The governess decides that the children are aware of the apparitions and simply saying nothing, which outrages her, since this means they have secrets from her and implies that their placid exteriors are false ("It's a game...a policy and a fraud"). Before long, she is obsessed with her own theories about the mysterious figures ("How can I retrace to-day the strange steps of my obsession?"), what their intentions are, what their relationship was when they were living, and the children's unusually nonchalant reaction to them.
In her obsession and hysteria, the governess quickly becomes dangerous to the children herself, unable as she is to think of anything else, despite the apparent passivity of the specters. Unstated but implied is the sexual corruption of the children by Quint and Jessel, and of the evil pair's overall malign influence.
The intelligent governess, young and coming from a proper British home as she has, seems slightly naïve and easily outraged, but not sexually or emotionally repressed. She has a crush on her distant employer, who she only meets once and knows she will never meet again, that being the terms of her contract. Of the probable sexual relationship between the unmarried Quint and Jessel, the governess is only responding as any well-raised woman of her young age and social class would.
There are several effective passages in 'The Turn of the Screw,' which builds its sense of suspense slowly, despite being only 93 pages.
However, even at such length, the novella is simply too long, which makes it difficult to sustain interest and attention, especially since most of the text is devoted to the governess's rambling emotionalism and ideas, not to anything resembling a traditional ghost or gothic story.
Those who enjoy the book should seek out the excellent 1961 film version starring superb actress Deborah Kerr, 'The Innocents,' which follows the original closely, but makes the character of the governess some 20 years older.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Ghost Story, December 3, 2009
This review is from: The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)
Turn of the Screw is a lot different than some of the other things that I've read by Henry James--he is said to have a pretty wide range of styles and subject matter. Some of his later novels, especially, delve into the Modernist preoccupation with interiority--what's going on in someone's mind instead of focusing on the plot/action of the story. I enjoy this aspect of Modernism, but it can be difficult to follow and many people do not like reading stream-of-consciousness.
In contrast, I would say that Turn of the Screw is the most accessible of James's work that I have read thusfar. The focus is on the plot and the story moves fairly quickly--I read the novelle in just a couple of hours. Moreover, it's a ghost story--and who doesn't love a good ghost story? I found the story riveting and entertaining.
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