When I first heard about Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code" I got the impression that it was some kind of new Umberto Eco. Mystery with religious symbols and so on. Well, I don't remember how many pages (or sentences) I had to read before I realised that book was as far from Umberto Eco as it is possible to be. I was soooo disappointed.

But well, I tried to meet a book from different ankle (this-is-just-an-entertainment-book-ankle) and I kind of understood why people liked the book. It was very easy to get hooked even when, as a piece of litterature, book was quite pathetic. After awhile I even started to like it. You just had to put your brains to the different frequency.

Something like that happened with this book. I don't know why, but somehow I had got an impression that Diana Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" was a good book. I thought it was (I don't like this expression, but here it comes:) high literature. So after couple of first pages I got quite angry. Book was soooo bad. Narrator repeated and highlighted every time she wanted to tell something important. (You get my point...)

Yeah, it's nice to know that you think your readers are stupid, thank you very much.

I really didn't want to read the whole book. But well, it's really hard for me to not to read the book once I have started it so I kept going and decided to chage my attitude towards it. It obviously wasn't a piece of high literature but it could maybe be entertaining if I would give it a chance. And you know what, it was! In the end it was actualle a really good entertainment book. I just shouldn't have waited anything else from it in the first place.

Book tells a story about a writer Vida Winter who is supposed to be the best English write alive. Now she is dying but before that she wants to tell her best story, her own story and she asks young book shop-keeper to write it down.

And then... we meet a group of evil twins, mad uncles, big scary houses and lots of lies, secrets and curses. Setterfield doesn't even try to hide what she loves: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and so on. Old stories about old secrets. Well, why not, those are always good to have around.

All in all, I did like the book. Most of all I loved how much people in it loved literature. Maybe that's why I was so eager to forgive the writer so much. It's hard not to like someone who has so passionate relationship with books.

 

Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter I had been ashamed to say so.