Holy crap, I hate Henry James.

So when I was home last May, Illy convinced me to buy a used copy of The Turn of the Screw with my book credit at the Book Stall in Brandon. I bought it and forgot about it.

Later, in Shanghai, while I was browsing books with SS in a Carrefour supermarket, I stumbled upon The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction by Henry James. The name sounded familiar, so I figured it must be good, and I bought it. I didn’t find out until much later that I already had it.

Anyway, the story is only 100 pages long, but it took me weeks to read. Why? Because fricking Henry James writes in the most obnoxious style ever! I realize it may be largely because I haven’t read any “classic English literature” in a while (like Dickens or something), with its really long rambling sentences. My ability to read this kind of stuff has atrophied. But I really don’t have much patience for it anymore.

Maybe it’s because Henry James is such a genius of a writer that he he can really write just how an Englishwoman of that era would think. I so wanted to smack her again and again throughout the entire novella. I also wanted to wring those two little kids’ necks every time they called their nanny “dear.”

And the ending? Both satisfying (if you read it, you know why I say this) and anticlimactic.

The story’s narrator speaks of the story’s “general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain.” Now I know what he meant.

Henry James, I do not appreciate you.