PAGES FROM A YOUNG GIRL’S JOURNAL by Robert Aickman
“It is almost as if the nearer one approaches to a thing, the less it proves to be there, to exist at all.”
Aickman in the role of his most arched aching part…
If one slowly takes this young Derbyshire girl’s journal slowly enough it dawns on you, almost endlessly, what she is becoming, in an Italy where she literally crosses paths with Byron and Shelley. And she falls in fell love with a sporadic shadowy male figure (originally prefigured by one black candle amongst twelve that are white), arguably the same male figure that she previously spies secretly hugging the twelve year old daughter of an older Contessa (who also sexually importunes our journal-keeper, too, but fails in doing so) — all of this taking place in genius-loci where our journal-keeper is staying as part of a grand tour, along with her insufferably old parents. Until she becomes insufferably old herself? — “One cannot expect to enter the tournament of love and emerged unscratched:”
The richly Gothic real-time journal narration as exalted by deep adolescent pangs while passionately steeped with the blood of Romishness against the shallow Protestantisms of her parents. A narration that is “too prone to the insertion of unnecessary hyphens”, or not? — and “….fiction though it be, could hardly with sense have been written at all.”
All my reviews of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
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