by Diane Setterfield
A student recommended this book to me about three years ago. She was a good student and tended to have good taste in books, but this book was in the middle of some popular hype which I tend to find distasteful. The Thirteenth Tale actually deserves the hype it got and it's too bad that it has pretty much faded back out of general consciousness.
The story of the novel centers around two primary characters: Margaret Lea (the narrator), and Vida Winter. Vida Winter is an enigmatic and somewhat crotchety author at the end of her life. She is known for never disclosing her true history and instead inventing colorful, but spurious, back stories for herself. However, Ms. Winter decides to hire Margaret Lea to write her authorized biography before she succumbs to death. Her true biography.
The problem for Miss. Lea though is that she isn't really a biographer. She's a shop clerk at an antiquarian bookshop owned by her father. She's practically a hermit and her only hobby is putting together biographical essays on long dead and insignificant people. Oh, and she doesn't read literature by people who are still alive. So why, of all the people in the world, would Vida Winter, the most successful popular author of her day, want a hermetical bookshop clerk who never read her books to write what is perhaps the most sought-after biography in her world.
Regardless, Miss. Lea decides to take the job after several stipulations and the work commences. The narrative is primarily told in two interwoven voices. The first is Margaret Lea's, who's voice comments on her own thoughts, the world around Vida Winter, and the various supplementary investigations she does. The second voice, is the voice of Vida Winter as she tells her history to Miss. Lea. The balance between the two voices is superb and it avoids the trap of being too linear with clever side trips that all end up being relevant to the central mystery.
By the end of the story I found myself so wrapped up in the narrative that I was crying at the State Track Meet for Georgia surrounded by my team.
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