Riveting Read!

Daphne du Maurier's The Birds and other stories is the book in for review in this blog post. 

A set of six stories, the common feature they (all barring one) share is an element of thrill, some unknown information that keeps the reader hooked till the end. 

The book begins with Birds, my favorite in this collection. Set against the backdrop of World War II, the story describes how life changes for a simple family in a Cornish seaside town with the advent of winter when birds for very strange reasons turn highly aggressive, cause death and unleash large scale destruction. From an uneasy calm, to becoming increasingly eerie and unfolding into a full blown catastrophe at the end, the writer keeps you spellbound through the length of the story. The story is believed to be an allegory of the Blitz attack on London towards the end of World war II. 

Monte Verita - a good sized novelette, is another great story in this pack, lot of theology and philosophy packed into this one but the two subjects do not bring boredom to the reader. Beautifully written, reading this one is akin to rolling a long rectangular sheet of paper to let its shorter, opposite sides (quite like the start and end of the story) just touch each other. There are many wonderful lines that call for good introspection and below is one such example - 

"Religious teachers disagree when they try to show the difference between good and evil; what is a miracle to one becomes black magic to another. The good prophets have been stoned, but so have the witch doctors. Blasphemy in one age becomes holy utterance in the next, and this day's heresy is tomorrow's credo".

The Apple Tree is about a recently widowed man who cannot wait to settle into some peace and private space, after years of lull, spent with his over-laborious and ever complaining wife, Midge.They say that the usual fortune of a complaint is to excite more contempt than pity, so as the man talks distastefully about his dead wife through the length of the story; piles up hatred against an old, odd-looking, stooping apple tree in the yard, putting every effort to get rid of it, he only leaves a certain acerbity in us towards him. This is a story where the author does not hold the reader's attention tight. 

The Little Photographer carries the trend forward like its predecessor in the book of being unable to hold the readers' attention, a clearly predictable tale with a certain cinematic quality about it. A Marquise's life, laden with riches and comforts and yet her heart searches fervently for clandestine pleasures which gets her into real trouble in the end.Despite that banal plot, I loved the story for the way in which it is written, describing an illicit affair sans obscenity is quite next to impossible in contemporary writing. 

And quite like a turn of the tide, the last two stories pack a powerful punch in a brief space in this book. 

Kiss me again, Stranger is a thriller, highly intact right from start to end, a reader wanders in his/her head to many possible conclusions only to get bowled over by the author in the climax. 

The Old Man is a winner in the end, as brilliant as Birds. Now what does one say of a story where the central points are left in suspense to be revealed only in the last few lines, marvelous isn't it? 

There is an excellent foreword at the start of the book that highlights the differences between the world of writing books and making films based on them, between authors and movie directors, worth a read. 

Reading Daphne du Maurier occurred to me pretty late, but now that I started with this one, I am allured enough to read all her other works.