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Synopsis
A re-release of the National Book Award-winning author's favorite work follows detective Xavier Kilgarvan's confrontation with three cases, including "The Virgin in the Rose-Bower," "The Devil's Half-Acre," and "The Blood-Stained Gown." Reprint.
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5 reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Enthralling and Challenging. A twisted and romantic journey
19 Nov 1998
Format:Hardcover
Fascinating book, when one considers that Oates is writing in the early 1980s in a retrospective style and language. She completely hits the Victorian mark. Don't expect "easy reading"-- this one takes time and committment, but it's worth it. Elements of horror, romance, and historical interest are blended in a fairly balanced manner. The first tale in this 'trilogy' of sorts gets bogged down a bit with all of the Kilgarvan family trivia, but it is essential to the rest of the tales. Work through it. Xavier Kilgarvan is truly one of the most unique and engaging (and pitiful) characters of all the detective/mystery genre. The most impressive aspect of this novel is that Oates leaves mysteries as mysteries. Meaning, she does not rend the veil of mystery in some hackneyed (though at times clever) manner, like so many writers in this genre (Doyle). The supernaturally strange events in Winterthurn remain shrouded (and as you will see, justifiably so) even after extensive examination and "ratiocination" (Oates' word). In the end, the Truth (if there be such a thing) is left for us to speculate. The importance (and the fun) lies in the journey, not in an unattainable destination!
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Mysteries of Winterthurn
23 Sep 2001
Format:Paperback
Oates has taken some vintage American crimes and fictionalized them to shed light on the true "mysteries of Winterthurn" : The attitudes towards class and gender which make the true culprits and events highly explicable to the reader, but not to the inhabitants of Winterthurn. The aristocratic inhabitants of Winterthurn (the poorer ones don't matter) are willfully blind to facts which conflict with their images of each other, which enables a vicious sex killer to operate with ease, or for a lady to get away with crimes which would have been detected quickly if commited by a poor woman. The poor can be hired, fired, scapegoated, raped, even murdered at will, and the parallels between their economic vulnerability and degradation, and their vulnerability to violence is deftly handled. Oates' description of Riviere du Loup, the working class community which Winterthurn uses as a refuge dump and as a place where any crime may be commited against the lower class inhabitants by the wealthy young men of Winterthurn, is chilling and plausible.
And for the record : Ms Oates didn't merely go back and take old crimes and recast them event-for-event with her own fictional characters in the roles of murderer, victim, witness...Instead, she takes elements from many different crimes and recombines them. Recognizing the famous cases adds to the pleasure of the book. Here are some of the famous crimes which she used in the plotting of "Winterthurn":
The Lizzie Borden case,
The Hall-Mills murder case, aka the minister and the choir singer,
The Thomas Piper "Bat Belfry Murders",
The Leo Frank tragedy,
and I believe I detect traces of
Mary Rogers,
Theodore Durrant, and
Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray.
The distancing effect of the archaic language helps to make it clear to the reader that the plight of the poor and downtrodden has changed little in the decades gone by. The language will add to some reader's pleasure ; others will find it off putting. It requires the reader to really think about the information s/he is being given, as the narrator is the 'incompetent omniscient' : A third person narrator who knows everything, including the most private thoughts of the characters, but who misses entirely the truth of the crimes and the motives of the actors. This makes the portrait of Erasmus Kilgarven, one of the most evil villians in modern American literature, all the more horrific.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
The Case of The Mysterious Narrator
11 Oct 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
My take on this last novel in Oates' Gothic trilogy - and Oates's self-proclaimed favourite of the three -diverges somewhat from the other four reviewers here. The other reviewers have covered well the aspects of the novel that reveal how disparagingly women were treated, and how the class-system in turn of the Twentieth Century America was so rigid so that one is compelled rather to call it a caste system, the social divisions are so strong, and the consequences of it so nearly unthinkable to the modern mind.
But what intrigued me from the very start was the narrator, who obtrudes himself from the very beginning in an "Editor's Note." At first, he seems to be a commonplace citizen of Winterthurn in the 1880s, with similar prejudices and anachronistic judgements and, most importantly, employing the lush, seductive archaic language of the time. It is only at the beginning of the third and last mystery that he reveals that he is a modern chronicler (i.e. late 20th Century) yet still employing this archaic language and holding these prejudices that seem so foreign. Indeed, to the modern mind, he gets almost everything wrong - from his dismissal of "Iphiginia" and her poems, so obviously modelled on Emily Dickinson, to his verdict on the last mystery, the Jekyll and Hyde nature of which and the obvious logical culprit even the reviewers here seem to have missed.
He's a self-proclaimed chronicler of factual events, supposedly relying on documents, yet assumes the omniscient perspective throughout the book. This contradiction is outrageously apparent in chapters such as "Quicksand" - probably my personal favourite of the book.
And the language! How wonderful and esoteric for logophiles such as myself, yet employed in a rather tedious way - the prime example being the use of "withal" and its contradictory meanings of "moreover" and "nevertheless" - sometimes employed four or five times in a single page, causing the reader to pause slightly each time to twig, by context, which one of these two meanings this wily narrator is signifying!
So what is a reader to make of all this? First, let me state here for the record that, contra Oates, I find the second novel in the trilogy, A Bloodsmoor Romance, to be the finest, most virtuosic of the three.
But, in assessing the disjointed, paludal, well, mess of these three mysteries, the seemingly obtuse throwback of a narrator, and his luxuriant, archaic stylism, my eye wanders back to the Editor's Note at the start of it all and the last sentence of it:
"Yet it were well for the contemporary reader to withhold judgment; and to reflect that our ancestors, though oft appearing less informed than ourselves, were perhaps far more sensitive, - nay, altogether more astute, in comprehending Evil."
And, well - Who knows? - Perhaps they were.
But what intrigued me from the very start was the narrator, who obtrudes himself from the very beginning in an "Editor's Note." At first, he seems to be a commonplace citizen of Winterthurn in the 1880s, with similar prejudices and anachronistic judgements and, most importantly, employing the lush, seductive archaic language of the time. It is only at the beginning of the third and last mystery that he reveals that he is a modern chronicler (i.e. late 20th Century) yet still employing this archaic language and holding these prejudices that seem so foreign. Indeed, to the modern mind, he gets almost everything wrong - from his dismissal of "Iphiginia" and her poems, so obviously modelled on Emily Dickinson, to his verdict on the last mystery, the Jekyll and Hyde nature of which and the obvious logical culprit even the reviewers here seem to have missed.
He's a self-proclaimed chronicler of factual events, supposedly relying on documents, yet assumes the omniscient perspective throughout the book. This contradiction is outrageously apparent in chapters such as "Quicksand" - probably my personal favourite of the book.
And the language! How wonderful and esoteric for logophiles such as myself, yet employed in a rather tedious way - the prime example being the use of "withal" and its contradictory meanings of "moreover" and "nevertheless" - sometimes employed four or five times in a single page, causing the reader to pause slightly each time to twig, by context, which one of these two meanings this wily narrator is signifying!
So what is a reader to make of all this? First, let me state here for the record that, contra Oates, I find the second novel in the trilogy, A Bloodsmoor Romance, to be the finest, most virtuosic of the three.
But, in assessing the disjointed, paludal, well, mess of these three mysteries, the seemingly obtuse throwback of a narrator, and his luxuriant, archaic stylism, my eye wanders back to the Editor's Note at the start of it all and the last sentence of it:
"Yet it were well for the contemporary reader to withhold judgment; and to reflect that our ancestors, though oft appearing less informed than ourselves, were perhaps far more sensitive, - nay, altogether more astute, in comprehending Evil."
And, well - Who knows? - Perhaps they were.
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