Miss Todd's Corner

The Thirteenth Tale

By Diane Setterfield

Meet Vida winter, an eccentric writer, who has lived most of her life telling stories and creating characters. Vida Winter is one of England’s best loved writers and has called on Margaret Lea, to scribe her biography.  Up until now, Ms. Winter has made the story of her life somewhat of a game, much to the dismay of the reporters and the media.  Year after year, her story changed depending on what novel she had just written, or what imaginative story she felt like making up and calling it her life. 

Ms. Winter is getting old, and is very ill.  She has decided that now is the time to tell her story to the world.  Margaret is seemingly a nobody, a girl who has worked in her father’s bookstore all her life, and seems to know very little outside of the world and quiet life that she has created for herself.  Her reason for picking Margaret was that she suspected that Margaret was a twin. 

Given that background information, I will tell you that it took me quite some time to get into this book.  I kept waiting for something exciting to happen.  I felt bad because I selected this book for a book club, and could not get into it.  The one element in the story though that kept me reading was the language.  Vida Winter said: “When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid.  What you need are the plump comforts of a story, the soothing rocking safety of a lie.”  This book was obviously about people who truly understood books and words, people who hung on to words for life, and took their strength from the stories they created. 

As I was pulled further into the life of Vida Winter, I became intrigued.  We learned that she had a twin, and that their life was far beyond the imagination.  Their mother was sent to an insane asylum and they were left to be raised by their not so sane uncle, and the missus (the housekeeper).  The twins were very strange, and there was something inherently evil about one of them.  And then there was Hester the governess and the doctor who wanted to perform experiments on the twins and analyze their bizarre behaviors.  The story continued to reveal adultery, betrayal, murder, jealousy, guilt, greed, all of those elements that make the characters real and make us want to be a part of their lives.  These girls, and the family that they lived in, remind us that we all have skeletons in the closest and are all dysfunctional on some level.

I don’t want to give away this book.  I want to tell you everything about it, but I don’t want to take the thrill away from all those who may read this book.  It takes so many bizarre twists and turns that I told a friend, I felt like I was being hit in the head over and over again by two by fours.  I never saw any of it coming.  There were several times in this book, where I was reading and then all of the sudden out of nowhere, something completely unexpected would happen, something that not even the best reader could predict.

I have to say, that I found this book to be truly impressive.  It is by far one of the most psychologically intriguing books I have read in quite some time.  I never knew so much about the psychology of twins.  Even after I discussed the novel in my book club, there were more elements to the books that I did not even see.  I will say that in the end, I respected Vida and had a new view on Margaret as a person.    I would recommend this book highly.  If you decide to read this one, I would love to hear your thoughts.  My email address is Nimoke@yahoo.com

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