Book Review: The Prince of Mist

I picked up this novel (in English) at my local library recently. I only knew Carlos Ruiz Zafón as author of the novels Shadow of the Wind (2001) and The Angel’s Game (2008). I’m not even 100% sure if I actually read/finished the latter. Anyway I did not know that Zafón started his career already back in 1992 as a writer of young adult fiction. 'The Prince of Mist' turned out to be not a new novel but the first he ever published. I think it is best categorized as a sort of ghost story, even if the blurb prefers to call it “a mesmerising tale of romance and adventure”. (Well - it is that too.)

In 1943, Max Carver's father - a watchmaker and inventor - decides to move his family to a small town on the coast, to an abandoned house that holds many secrets and stories of its own. Behind the house Max discovers an overgrown garden surrounded by a metal fence topped with a six-pointed star. In the centre is a large statue of a clown set in another six-pointed star.

As the family settles in they grow increasingly uneasy: Max’s sister Alicia has disturbing dreams while his other sister, Irina, hears voices whispering to her from an old wardrobe. With his new friend Roland, Max also discovers the wreck of a boat that sank many years ago in a terrible storm. Everyone on board perished except for one man - an engineer who built the lighthouse at the end of the beach.

As they learn more about the wreck, the chilling story of a legendary figure called the Prince of Mist begins to emerge...

Certain elements in the book remind me of the Harry Potter story but in other respects it’s more like classic adult gothic novels like Wuthering Heights. It has a very limited set of characters, it lacks the humour of Harry Potter, and it leaves more things open. I was caught up in the story while reading; but it left too many “loose ends” for my taste. It’s the kind of book I find  hard to rate just after reading it. Sometimes only time can tell whether a book will stay in one’s memory or not!

Lazy Summer Days

I still have some more photos from our Friday outing unblogged; but to bring you up to date, since then we’ve had three consecutive lazy summer days at our House. Most of the time just sitting in the shade…
We = me, my brother, and his dog Harry:

Pfft! (spitting moss)… Did someone mention my name?

I can be alert if I want to! What’s that smell??

On a walk we found a bottle of lighter fluid lying in the middle of the road leading to/from the lake. (Someone probably dropped it off a bike.) It inspired Per to also find the barbeque grill…

As for me, in between my sittings in the garden, I also did a little more exploring inside. In a wardrobe upstairs, I unexpectedly found this hat:

From the initials inside it I conclude that it used to belong to my grandfather. I can’t recall seeing any photos of him wearing it, though.

The House of Glass (II)

On Friday, my brother and I visited The House of Glass, a glass museum at Limmared; a village about 35 km south east of Borås. Limmareds glasbruk, founded in 1740, is Sweden's oldest still running glassworks – maybe best known as manufacturer of the Absolut Vodka bottle. (The third largest brand of alcoholic spirits in the world, according to omniscient Wiki.)

 

The entrance to the glass museum. (The bottle to the right I copied from Google Images. I’ve never even tasted the stuff.)

Old glassworks equipment

 

A model of the glassworks and village in 1902.

 

Where the magic takes place…
Live demonstration.

 

The same photo as in yesterday’s blogpost,
somewhat straightened up (for Adrian!)

The same glass case seen from the other side,
looking towards the windows.

 

This one is for Sandra!

 

Painted white glass.

 

Edvin Ollers (1888-1959)

Swedish designer and artist who
designed a lot of products for Limmared
from the late 1920s into the 1940s;
among other things perfume bottles.
He also made designs for other glassworks;
and also worked with other materials
like tin, silver, ceramics and oil painting.

Close-ups of some of the smaller objects.

 

Modern installation art: Bottle Post

…

The House of Glass also contains an exhibition hall for contemporary art, a small shop and a café. There will be some more pictures coming up in later posts.

Linking this post to Shadow Shot Sunday

Weekend Reflections: The House of Glass (I)

Not easy to make out what’s what in this photo. You might be tempted to think I was looking through the glass case towards the windows, but the windows that you see here were actually on the wall behind me…

The photo is from the Glass Museum at Limmared, Sweden. More photos from my visit there today will be coming up soon. This one is for Weekend Reflections.

Book Review: Maise Dobbs #9 and #10

For background on the Maise Dobbs series, see my reviews of #7, The Mapping of Love and Death (and #8, A Lesson in Secrets. Having liked #8 better than #7, I decided to go straight on from that one to the next:

 

Jaqueline Winspear: Elegy for Eddie
(Maise Dobbs #9)  (2012) ****

April, 1933. To the costermongers of London, Eddie Pettit is simply a gentle soul with a near-magical gift for working with horses. When he is killed in a violent accident, the costers are sceptical about the cause of his death, and recruit Maisie Dobbs to investigate. Maisie, who has known these men since childhood and remembers Eddie fondly, is eager to help. But it soon becomes clear that powerful political and financial forces are equally determined to prevent her from learning too much about Eddie's death  ---
(From Amazon’s book description)

I found this book keeping up the standard from the previous one; the mystery concerning Eddie’s death enhances Maise’s personal struggles to get used to having climbed up quite a bit on the social ladder since her own childhood and youth.

So after finishing that one, I decided to catch up and read the most recently published book in the series too:

Leaving Everything Most Loved
(Maise Dobbs # 10)  (2013) ***

London, 1933. Some two months after an Indian woman, Usha Pramal, is found murdered in a South London canal, her brother turns to Maisie Dobbs to find the truth about her death. Not only has Scotland Yard made no arrests, but evidence indicates they failed to conduct a full and thorough investigation. ---
(From Amazon’s book description)

As usual the author is good at descriptions of the time period, and here she brings in some of the culture clashes that come with people from other parts of the Commonwealth moving to England/London to live. However, I feel that both the mystery and the background story are losing tempo again in this book. It feels too much like an interlude or “treading water” as far as Maisie’s personal life is concerned. (Of course most of us go through periods like that. But that does not necessarily mean it makes a good novel…) The book keeps pointing forward to more drastic changes coming up; but as for what will really happen, we shall have to wait until the next book to find out (the author knows by now how to keep us wondering). And that I think is a common weakness with series that just go on and on.

 

Quotes from Elegy for Eddie:

Sometimes we say we’re sad when we would be better served by using the word melancholy, for example. Sometimes anger can be more accurately described as frustration. The distinction helps us identify a path through the maze of emotion – and emotions can be debilitating, can paralyze us if we allow them power, and we do that when we fail to be precise.

I think I want to find out what it’s like to approach a corner without constantly trying to be prepared for what I might encounter when I round it.
---
Yes, it does make the load rather heavy if you carry tools for every eventuality.

 

Quote from Leaving Everything Most Loved

Maisie paused, putting the information about [---] to one side in her mind, as if moving a saucepan to another burner on the stove – it was not to be forgotten, but could simmer while her focus was on the main reason for her call.