The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you need any proof of how amazing Daphne du Maurier’s writing is, do give The Birds and Other Stories a go. I don’t need that reassurance though, I have already jumped over the boundaries of blind faith in her writing by this point. But, still, every du Maurier story gives me high, honestly! Yes yes, you can roll your eyes and say that I have caught the revival bug, but I am just glad that I found her work even if I found it this late in my life. Because it is simply amazing! Also, her writing lends itself to cinematic experience so naturally. Even as I was reading the first story of this anthologies, I found myself thinking about how amazing the story would be when turned into a movie. It was only later that I learnt that several of her works have been adapted to the silver screen by Hitchcock. While my opinion of the movie The Birds is not as amazing as its story, I still am a huge fan of the book. In any case, as one read The Birds, one realises how vivid are the images that form in your mind even as you are reading it. As bizarre as it might sound, The Birds was indeed an extremely “visual” experience for me.
The collection comprises of following six short stories, each of which is a little dark but also has a certain clandestine charm to it, the feeling of not becoming fond of it outrightly but getting hooked to it in a gradual manner. The Birds is definitely my favourite story. Believed to be a metaphorical reference to the air strikes of WWII, particularly the Blitz, it is thrilling and sinister, not in the “All will be well in the end way.” It starts with the birds in a Cornish seaside town starting to being in an inexplicably strange way, turning distinctly malevolent and aggressive. The narrator, who works on a farm, initially attributes it to the arrival winter and changing weather patterns, probably causing the birds to get confused. But he cannot outrightly shrug the feeling that something more nefarious is about to happen. And well it does and gets only worse as the story progresses. The story has a distinctly eery feeling all over it, from the start to the finish. The kind of eery that does not need any harbingers or subtle hints to tell you something is going to go horribly wrong. You know it is happening soon and it is inevitable. The only thing you don’t know is what catastrophe it is actually going to be.
Monte Veritá ( translates to Hill of Truth ) has a premise that had immense potential, drawing from the plethora of tales, fables and myths that surround the mountain with the same name in Switzerland. The heroine in the story has all the hallmarks of a du Maurier heroine and which is why the reader is instantly attracted to her. She is mysterious, yet bold, extremely clear about her aims. It dabbles a little with the cult and the occult but somehow fails to reach a proper conclusion, at least in my head. It might seem that the plot is a little clichéd, but it was the climax that let me down more than the build-up for me.
The Apple Tree has a slightly sarcastic or caustic feel about it, I am somehow unable to call it darkly comic. It is about a recently widowed man, who is not exactly likeable, despite the many excuses and reasons that ate put forth in his defence. He somehow develops a great dislike for an apple tree in his yard, that seems to touch all the sore points of his guilty conscience. And he decides to hack it off, forming the excuses and the plans in mind, somehow unable to execute them. It is more of man vs tree sort of story which I found to extremely predictable.
The Little Photographer is a character study of a middle-aged woman, marquise to be precise, who married an older, successful man enamoured by the glamour, but seems to feel that the charm is wearing off. She finds her comfortable life a bit tedious and envies the freedom of her friends who are unencumbered by the restrictions she has in her life. She enters into a clandestine dalliance with a photographer on one of her unsupervised holidays hoping to keep it casual. Things take a nasty, yet predictable turn when she realises the situation is about to blow over. The least liked of all the stories for me, not even the French flavour of it could salvage it for me.
Kiss Me Again, Stranger is another good one from the collection, because it is tightly narrated, not letting on too much of the mystery at any given point in time. It unravels slowly and gradual, one thread at a time, and is deliciously dark and mysterious. Just like the heroine of Monte Veritá, the lady, a cinema usherette, here is the exact opposite of coy, just enough innocent to not throw too many red flags, to begin with, and she knows what she wants from the casual fling before she begins it. A nighttime stroll in the graveyard is not exactly romantic, the story gives no allusions that it is about romance, even if it might feel so for one brief in the very beginning. It is a thriller and a good one at that.
The Old Man was stellar, I don’t have enough words for it. Since I am unable to keep my bias towards The Birds, so I might call it the second best, but for a more neutral me it would have been a tie. A voyeur neighbour secretly watches a family living on the beach, judging them and leading the reader to judge them. BUT, the end was ingenious, I never really saw it coming and was hit by it, leaving me like a victim of a train wreck but in a good way. Not going to get into the details and spoil in for you! Brilliant is all I will say.
Diving into My Pensieve 