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Hi world...

I finished reading ‘The Thirteenth Tale’ a few days back. I can only say that the book is unlike any novel that I had read. As I mentioned in my earlier post, it is a book (novel) about books and from my meagre experience of having read 4 such books (and halfway through the fifth – The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber), I can say that these books about books have a major ‘whodunit’ element in them, which makes them so interesting and absorbing. Though The Thirteenth Tale is not a whodunit in the strictest sense, and there is no crime or detective searching for clues to solve it, the tale is a ‘search’ in many ways. There is this bestselling novelist, Vida Winter, who has worn a mask successfully throughout her adult life and now that she is dying, wants to remove the mask and come out with her true story…which she has kept secret all along…and she does not want to tell her story to just about anybody…she has selected to tell her story to an amateur antiquarian bookseller who is also a sort of biographer, Margaret Lea … and this biographer has secrets of her own…the novelist has specific conditions to tell her story…which, of course, the bookseller agrees to…the writer wants her biographer to find out about her, but wouldn’t allow her to ask questions…enough hints are thrown…in essence, it is a mutual search for …not as much as for truth…but solace...

I have started The Book of Air and Shadows…there are lots of books here…book binding, book selling, ancient manuscripts, codes, ciphers, a conned and failed academic and finally the ‘holy grail’…a search for the manuscript of a so-far unknown and unheard of play by ‘William the Shakespeare’ himself…lot of intrigue here…and interspersed with the story of the search is the 17^th c. manuscript which talks of the Bard being spied upon for being a catholic…and the chapters of the manuscript written by the 'spy' in 17^th c. English is interestingly placed in between the chapters of the novel…when everything we supposedly know about the Bard being mere speculation built upon a few scraps of information, this manuscript becomes the focus of rival searches and scraps among inheritors, this once-conned and disgraced Shakespearean scholar, and ‘the mafia’…all in all, a good read…will tell you more…I am halfway through…till then…ciao…

Jai