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Aug. 6th, 2014 05:29 pmNow is a bad time to acquire books, but nonetheless I ended up picking up an old paperback called A Maggot from a used bookstore on a whim the other day. Then I read it. Now I'm ... frustrated and existentially confused?
A Maggot begins with the journey of five travelers: a nobleman, his deaf and mute right-hand man, his uncle, a manservant, and a lady's maid. In the first chapter it is rapidly revealed that the uncle is actually a fake uncle and the lady's maid is a prostitute.
Then they all ride off and a month later the right-hand man turns up hanged in the woods with some flowers stuffed in his mouth. Everyone else is missing, mostly because they never existed in the first place in the identities that they were introduced as.
The rest of the book is mostly a series of testimonies, as the nobleman's father sends a lawyer to investigate where he's gotten to, why his right-hand man has turned up dead in the woods, and why he hired a bunch of people to pretend to be, variously, a fake uncle, a fake manservant, and a fake lady's maid for a lady who didn't exist, and then set off to a trip to a cave in the middle of nowhere. The reader would also reasonably like to know most of this. Alas, reader and father both end up GENERALLY DISAPPOINTED.
(The narrator is omnipotent, but only when it comes to making sweeping generalizations about the eighteenth-century mindset, NOT IN ANY WAY WHEN IT COMES TO THE ACTUAL PLOT.)
( Spoilers remain existentially confused )
A Maggot begins with the journey of five travelers: a nobleman, his deaf and mute right-hand man, his uncle, a manservant, and a lady's maid. In the first chapter it is rapidly revealed that the uncle is actually a fake uncle and the lady's maid is a prostitute.
Then they all ride off and a month later the right-hand man turns up hanged in the woods with some flowers stuffed in his mouth. Everyone else is missing, mostly because they never existed in the first place in the identities that they were introduced as.
The rest of the book is mostly a series of testimonies, as the nobleman's father sends a lawyer to investigate where he's gotten to, why his right-hand man has turned up dead in the woods, and why he hired a bunch of people to pretend to be, variously, a fake uncle, a fake manservant, and a fake lady's maid for a lady who didn't exist, and then set off to a trip to a cave in the middle of nowhere. The reader would also reasonably like to know most of this. Alas, reader and father both end up GENERALLY DISAPPOINTED.
(The narrator is omnipotent, but only when it comes to making sweeping generalizations about the eighteenth-century mindset, NOT IN ANY WAY WHEN IT COMES TO THE ACTUAL PLOT.)
( Spoilers remain existentially confused )
