Review: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

4 stars for The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.

This book is what I will call, an unexpected rescue read. Over the years, I have put more books than I care to remember, into the out of sight, out of mind list. These are books that I fail to finish, not for lack of trying, but due to one reason or another, find myself unable to read to the end. This book is one of them. I remember wanting to read a story that does not involve parents, a father or a mother - mostly Young Adult fiction - and this book fails to meet that criterion at that point in time. Since then, this book has been out of my mind for quite some time until lately, when I chanced upon an IG post by a booklover who shared her love for this book and said she feels that this book is underrated. I remember the book right away and quickly move it back to my reading list again. As usual, my greatest fear is missing out on good reads.

It is when I pick up the book to start all over again, with a fresh perspective, that I realise what I have blatantly missed out the first time round. And I think to myself "How did I manage to overlook such a beautifully written story?" The truth is I have passed judgement on this book too early into my reading. The protagonist is indeed living with her father, but being 30 years old, the story will not in any way qualify as a Young Adult fiction which I am trying to avoid so badly.

This book is mostly about words, their language and the imagery it projects. The author is an expert at manipulating words. Such is her power that I am held prisoner by her writing; letters that resolved themselves quickly into characters, then words, then sentences. They make such enchanting passages that I find myself reading and re-reading them, trying to absorb as much of them as I possibly can.

The Thirteenth Tale is about England's best loved writer, Vida Winter and the truths to her life story and a bookseller, Margaret Lea who grows up with a love for books and reading and taking care of them in the bookstore.

The story is narrated in first person by Margaret who has no interest in contemporary writing and is more at ease with writing the biography of dead people than of the living.

To quote "The shop was both my home and my job. It was a better school for me than school ever was, and afterward it was my own private university. It was my life."

To quote "My real work is in the bookshop. My job is not to sell the books—my father does that—but to look after them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they’re not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down."

I think to myself as I read, how wonderful it must be, to grow up in a bookstore, especially one that is owned by the family, to be able to help out in the bookstore, to be with nothing but books, and to have nothing to do but read. Literature, biography, autobiography, memoirs, diaries, letters, you name it, the bookstore has it. How wonderful is that!

The author also put down in words simply, the very truth to the existence of books.

To quote "People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic."

This book is like a gateway to another world, at least before Vida Winter starts off on her own extraordinary story. It is difficult to like Vida Winter's story because it disturbs me to read about characters who are mentally deficient, and children whose behaviour are likely the result of parental neglect and/or lack of discipline. Even though I dislike the story within the story, I am absorbed by the storytelling. And the more I learn, the more curious I am about the missing gaps in the story. It is hard to fathom how the violent vagabond of a child who refuses to communicate properly with anyone except her sister, develops into a disciplined author with dozens of bestselling novels to her name.

The Thirteenth Tale is a spellbinding story. Not only does it bind me to the story, but it also bespells me to quote thirteen of the passages as my favourites. It is definitely not a deliberate move on my part. Reading this book is magic indeed. Underrated? Yes, definitely.


Publisher: Washington Square Press; First Trade edition
Publication date: 9 Oct 2007

*** Favourite Quote 1 ***

Thanks to my work, I am experienced in the reading of difficult manuscripts. There is no great secret to it. Patience and practice are all that is required. That and the willingness to cultivate an inner eye. When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you awake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying over vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.

*** Favourite Quote 2 ***

There is something about words. In expert words, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves round your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

*** Favourite Quote 3 ***

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

*** Favourite Quote 4 ***

What happened to me in that moment? Inside my head everything came to pieces and came back together differently, in one of those kaleidoscopic reorganizations the brain is capable of.

*** Favourite Quote 5 ***

..at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.

*** Favourite Quote 6 ***

..by a curious paradox, just as the books come to life when we read them, so the oils from our fingertips destroy them as we turn the pages.

*** Favourite Quote 7 ***

There is one thing on which we are agreed: There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

*** Favourite Quote 8 ***

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy.

*** Favourite Quote 9 ***

Her mouth opened and closed; as soon as her words fell from her lips they were smothered by the blanket of silence that descended and extinguished them. The same silence swallowed our footfalls, and muffled the opening and closing of doors as she showed me, one after another, the dining room, the drawing room, the music room.

*** Favourite Quote 10 ***

.. her eyes were so full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence.

*** Favourite Quote 11 ***

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

*** Favourite Quote 12 ***

My new knowledge blew life into the story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began to mend. The jagged edges smoothed themselves. The gaps filled themselves in. The missing parts were regenerated. Puzzles explained themselves, and mysteries were mysteries no longer.

*** Favourite Quote 13 ***

We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.

~ The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield

@}--->>--->>-----

Vida Winter, a bestselling yet reclusive novelist, has created many outlandish life histories for herself, all of them invention. Now old and ailing, at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to biographer Margaret Lea - a woman with secrets of her own - is a summons. Vida's tale is one of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family: the beautiful and wilful Isabelle and the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling, but as a biographer she deals in fact not fiction and she doesn't trust Vida's account. As she begins her researches, two parallel stories unfold. Join Margaret as she begins her journey to the truth - hers, as well as Vida's.

*Blurb from FantasticFiction*

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