The Woman Who Talked to Herself, by A. L. Barker

Barker’s narrator is a character we can relate to: she talks to herself. The running dialogues most of us keep internal, she speaks out loud, narrating the story of herself suspecting her husband of cheating on her. This fascinating method creates a work full of complex, rounded characters and dramatic scenes.

The stories she tells are each spurred by events in the ‘real’ life of the main plot. These stories develop the other characters, explain relationships between characters, and advance the plot. For instance, the storyteller’s daughter mentions the mother of one of her school friends. Barker’s character narrates a huge story about a complex relationship between that mother and a younger man, a story tingling with the potential for violence, both adolescent and mature at the same time, and ending with a tremendous surprise that leaves the reader reinterpreting the story’s previous events.

In another story, she imagines her son and his friend breaking into a large estate home. Her imaginings of their relationship are almost fanciful, maybe wild, but penetrating and entirely believable. She weaves what she knows about her son and his friend, and about confused and unrestrained adolescence, into a magnificent and memorable tale.

These stories within the main story are meaningful and poignant themselves; but, they way they explain and further the greater plot structure is amazing. Barker expertly uses this narrative structure to create a novel full of complex characters and significant happenings. She even ends the work with a surprise. This incredible and unique work is a strong example of purposeful writing that demonstrates the characteristics of good narration.

Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen

Dinesen’s second work on the bookshelf, Seven Gothic Tales, is a wonderful treat of carefully told stories with ‘gothic’ twists. The tales generally are of everyday bourgeoisie people (steeped in the class consciousness of the 19th century), people that are easy to relate to and emphasize with and people to whom significant, though dark and disturbing, things happen. The stories are not the least bit contrived; all the occurrences appear real and necessary to the plot; but, the atmosphere is slightly twisted and Dinesen reveals disturbing aspects of people’s lives for the reader.

In one story, a gentleman goes home with a woman he meets on the street and has sex with her. In this unseeming, darkened setting where a man brings a strange woman home for sex (in a story set in Victorian times even!), Dinesen incorporates an additional twist: she is a prostitute and he is her first client.

In another story, a deceased brother of two old women sits down to dinner with them. The expectation builds in this story for something dark to happen: the harrowing trip across a dangerous sea road by carriage; the older woman living alone, haunted by visions of her dead brother; the brother’s refusal of marriage and subsequent wild sea voyages. Dinesen sets the atmosphere expertly, and very subtly, so that when the three of them sit down to dinner, it seems quite unreasonably natural and a creepy feeling rises from inside the reader, based entirely on the untenable situation.

In other stories, the gothic element is downplayed throughout the story, but the ending has quite a twist. In one of these, a woman, attempting to set up two people for marriage, switches places with her favorite pet monkey and, at the end of the story, is left clawing and scraping at the molding around a parlor door. Because of the woman’s meddling in their affairs, two people, who do not love each other must get married, trapped in a horror of a marriage they seem perfectly made for.

As expected, Dinesen displays excellence in narrating these tales of twisted relationships, dark settings, and preternatural happenings. While keeping the stories believable, and using characters whom we care about, and to whom significant things happen, she weaves in a gothic element that surprises and disturbs the reader. In all, she offers examples of narrative fiction at its best.