I didn’t think that I would like this book all that much when I first picked it up. Literary fiction and I haven’t always gotten along in the past. But then, I kind of thought that about The Shadow of the Wind when I first read that one, but I loved that book and I keep recommending it to people.
Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, though, was so engaging that I ended up reading it in two days. The Thirteenth Tale is, I think, unique in fiction today because you don’t really get out-and-out Gothic fiction any more. And by Gothic fiction, I mean those depraved stories that you got around the same time that Romanticism was taking off. (I always kind of wondered about why those two literary movements coincided when I was a young lit major. How could a country produce someone like William Wordsworth at roughly the same time that it produces people like Matthew Lewis? Weird) Anyway, this book is about as bizarre as those first Gothic novels and the plots are about as disturbing, too.
One of the reasons I first picked this book up was because the New York Times book reviews said it was similar to The Shadow of the Wind, and about books with a mystery on top. But it’s not really about books so much as it is about storytelling, truth and lies. I hate to say much more about this book because when I try to think of a way to describe the plot I can only come up with sentences that involve truth being stranger than fiction and the ability of some people to reinvent themselves. And that sound a little dull, but I have to let you know that this book is damned interesting. It’s not an especially moving book, and it may not even be particularly believable when you pick apart the plot, but this book is fascinating.