The Thirteenth Tale

I scored a few Borders vouchers and went on a spree yesterday. I picked up Dara Horn's The World to Come, Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones, Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale.

Setterfield's debut novel was unknown to me - I hadn't read about it in reviews or in the upcoming-book-release blogs I frequent - but the cover caught my eye. A stack of heavy, worn books with yellow, red, and blue mottled pages; a red grosgrain ribbon pagefinder with a slanted edge; the title in an antique-looking font. Pictures of books - old books - always appeal to me so I turned the novel over to read its blurb. Set in England, the story centers on two characters, an aging, reclusive author ready to have her biography written, and the young biographer she invites to write her story. Apart from the lack of accurate information about Vida Winter's life, there is also the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale from her collection of stories about desperation and change. Maraget Lea leads a dreamy life that I've always wanted - she grew up in her father's antique bookstore, learned how to care for and restore books and manuscripts, and now lives in a small flat above the shop itself, which has three levels and rooms bulging with books. She has her own painful past to reckon with, and little does she expect her encounters with Vida Winter to make her face that past.

I've read a fair number of pages, and so far, the ideas and plot have kept me going. I like the huge presence of books and reading, and the ruminations on stories and truth. "Tell me the truth" is an important phrase at the beginning of the novel. And it makes you wonder, where is the truth among the stories we tell? Why do we tell certain stories and not others? The way we tell a story, and the choice of that story reveal much of ourselves - "Nothing is more telling than a story," as Vida Winter sharply observes. I'd like to think that despite our innate fear of revealing too much of ourselves, of becoming vulnerable to truths we may not often like, we still need to keep telling stories.

"Silence is not a natural environment for stories...They need words. Without them, they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you." ~ Vida Winter