The Aspern Papers

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Summary: an excellent introduction to Henry James and his style
Review: "The Aspern papers" is a surprisingly short, sexy and suspenseful novel. It will completely change your opinion of Henry James; he shows himself to be an master of suspense and well played out drama instead of the ambiguous pussyfooting plodder that most people think him to be. There is a definite touch of evil in this novella. It takes place in a stuffy interior world dominated by an old sinister woman in a green shade. The narrator's intentions are quite amoral and evil. The narration is deftly created through sure touches of insecurity and self pity. The trick of the unreliable narrator is used to great effect. And at no point does it seem anything other than a seamless and effective method of narration.

Rating:
Summary: an excellent introduction to Henry James and his style
Review: "The Aspern papers" is a surprisingly short, sexy and suspenseful novel. It will completely change your opinion of Henry James; he shows himself to be an master of suspense and well played out drama instead of the ambiguous pussyfooting plodder that most people think him to be. There is a definite touch of evil in this novella. It takes place in a stuffy interior world dominated by an old sinister woman in a green shade. The narrator's intentions are quite amoral and evil. The narration is deftly created through sure touches of insecurity and self pity. The trick of the unreliable narrator is used to great effect. And at no point does it seem anything other than a seamless and effective method of narration.

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Summary: Blue Unicorn Editions
Review: Blue Unicorn Editions publishes the most complete, unabridged, uncensored texts of the world's greatest literary works, in English and/or their original languages.

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Summary: it's like Jerry Seinfeld in smelly Paris
Review: Henry James - before this time yet definately in his time. This short novella puts a kind televsion in your face and asks you to laugh. Let me show you the commercials planned.

a writer

Rating:
Summary: Nice intro to James' style
Review: Henry James, The Aspern Papers (Laurel, 1888)

One of James' shortest novels, and one of his least-known, The Aspern Papers is a (supposedly based on a true) story about a young biographer of famed poet Jeffrey Aspern (based, depending on to whom you talk, on either Browning or Keats) who contrives to get his hands on the love letters Aspern wrote to a mistress by presenting himself at the now-ancient mistress' Italian villa and passing himself off as a wealthy traveller and author looking for lodging. The mistress lives with her spinster niece, whose age is never given (one assumes mid-forties, a few years older than the narrator), and the two are impoverished. Things go as planned until the narrator finds himself starting to like the niece a bit more than he bargained for.

The novel runs a bit over a hundred pages, which makes it an excellent introduction to James' extremely dry wit; it's much lighter-weight than the ponderous tomes he's known for. The prose here has an agility which is absent from works such as The Bostonians or The Wings of the Dove, but still manages to convey emotion quite well with only a few words and a gesture. The novel's last pages are a triumph of minimal writing, and probably deserve closer scrutiny than the works of James' that are normally assinged in English classes around the globe.

Oddly, the one major failing of this novel is that James abandons the minimalism every once in a while, and his characters go overboard with hysterical crying and the like so common to Victorian literature. In a book that's otherwise so controlled, these episodes-- never longer than a few sentences-- seem absurd more than anything; perfectly composed people suddenly collapse into tears as if shot with pepper spray, and then within the space of a paragraph are back to their cool, collected selves once again. These intrusions are minimal, and while they detract from the scenes in which they're placed, the novel overall is still a worthy one. If you've been turned off by James through exposure to one of those million-page drawing room comedies, you may want to give him another try with this. *** 1/2

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Summary: Venice in a Different Time
Review: I found this story/novella to be a real page turner. In my busy life I am ashamed to say that I can not seem to get through many longer books, but this was just the right size to provide an escape for an evening. James writing style is wonderfully evocative of a different time and place. The reader is transported to Venice in the 19th century where he meets, and becomes quite intimate with reclusive characters of former renown. The story provides a good deal of tension and suspense as the main character tries to manipulate his hosts to get what he wants - the Aspern Papers. If you are interested in a story that relys on subtle supense created by examining interpersonal relationships and expectations, this may be for you.

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Summary: Wonderful World of HJ
Review: If you have read the Turn of the Screw, this is the next step in reading James. The Ambassadors is next.

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Summary: Not bad
Review: James writes of a manipulative male who wants to take away the letters of a famous male poet from a woman who was his lover. In essences, the male narrator wants to steal the text of this woman's life while exerting control over the woman's identity by constructing the text as narrator. One gets the sense that James is not aware of the sexism in his writing (he always uses the language of patriarchy), but the sufferings of women at the hands of such males makes an interesting (and telling) story of oppresion of women in the 19th century.

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Summary: Short sharp Henry James shocker.
Review: Such is his facility with the essentials of theatre - concentrated narrative action; lengthy, dramatic scenes of dialogue; vivid characterisation; pointed use of interior space, exits and entrances, and the revealing image - you wonder why James failed as a playwright.

Of course, there is a defining element of James' art that is impossible in the theatre - narration. The nameless narrator of 'The Aspern Papers' is one of the greatest monsters in James' teeming gallery of inglorious masculinity - the editor of a revered American literary poet, who tries to wheedle important documents from a celebrated lover, the now-decrepit Juliana, by installing himself as a lodger, and flattering her aging spinster niece. Like most James heroes, who treat life like a selfish game, he has no idea what emotional havoc he is wreaking on the woman.

The tale has all the drive and tantalising delay of a crime story - the hero is both detective and criminal, and the suspenseful climax suggests what a great genre writer James could have been. As with Stendhal, just as exciting are the intricate, agonising dialogues between the narrator and the niece, each wildly misunderstanding the other.

But if 'Aspern' is a crime story, than the the criminal is of the order of Freddie Montgomery in Banville's 'The Book of Evidence', a brilliant, charming, frighteningly amoral man, whose check of social scruples is dicarded with shocking ease. His seemingly over-detailed account is full of gaps, self-defence, self-pity, evasion, vagueness, misremembering, disarming honesty and wild misinterpreations of others' characters and motives. He is a man who can't see beyond his own narrow goal, behind whom we always sense an unseen, all-seeing eye.

He is the forerunner to a second modern anti-hero, 'Pale Fire''s Charles Kinbote, another literary editor whose devotion to his subject has become mad and murderous. In a Victorian age full of cant about the ennobling power of art, James asserts, disturbingly, the opposite - repeated exposure to sublime poetry (and the book is full of ironic references to religion and glorious war) has only made the narrator emotinally dead, unable to respond to the humanity of others. This 'portrait' of an aging muse, malevolent and concupiscent is a stark warning to literary idealisers, and a sad study of human decline, but should also be seen as a reflection of the narrator's own desires.

'Aspern' is incidentally THE great Venice story, its watery decay somehow seeping through the narrator's blind egotism.

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Summary: who is using who?
Review: what a breath of fresh air this is to james' turn of the screw. the writing is so much clearer and easier to read. it makes the flow of the story much better thereby adding to the suspense. at the same time it contains some of the same ambiguities.

is the narrator amoral? yes his intentions are to become a boarder in the home of a former lover to the famous poet john aspern in order to get the letters he wrote to her. he does this through subterfuge. yet he has his limits. he won't court the spinster niece in order to get her help. he is actually quite honest and up front with her regarding his intentions when the time for deceipt comes. he also refuses to force her to do what she cannot.

the question becomes--is he the duper or the dupee? the actions of the women can easily be interpreted to reflect that they are willing to use the letters to entrap him to "become part of the family". he is continually induced to stay on by inference of help from the neice. the aunt also is part of a potential plot. she teases him with visits and a picture of aspern. does he get what he wants when he marries the niece?

as in the turn of the screw, this turn in the story is not made clear until the end. in order to find out who gets what, you'll have to read the book.

this story is good enough to make me think again about reading more james.