Christmas Presents - & Happy New Year for 2026!

Lutz Seiler: Star 111 (2020)

Mostly, in the past, we've asked each other for contributions towards particularly desirable Christmas presents in my family. It takes out the element of serendipity, but it does mean that nobody ends up with anything they don't want.

Given that both Bronwyn and I have a tendency to buy the things we want throughout the year, though, this year I asked her to surprise me with something I hadn't asked for. I was expecting a few pairs of socks or a t-shirt, so when I saw she'd got me a pair of new books instead, I was definitely surprised.

Lamplight Books (Parnell, Auckland)

She bought both of them from Lamplight Books in Parnell. Art-lovers tend to gravitate towards this shop, as it stocks some really remarkable illustrated books and graphic novels from all over the world. They also have a good selection of literature, and are always ready to advise on appropriate presents for those pesky "people who have everything" in our lives.

Lutz Seiler: In Case of Loss (2020)

I must admit that I'd never heard of Lutz Seiler before encountering these two books: his novel Star 111, about the reunification of Germany in 1990, is apparently considered one of the best fictional recreations of those times to date. But it comes as the culmination of a lifetime of work as a poet, fiction-writer and essayist. The best of his essays are collected in the volume above.

I can already tell that I'm going to like him. I've looked through of the essays, and his matter-of-fact, pared-back style appeals to me greatly. There's something very concrete and exact about his writing. And to someone who's spent so much time reading Böll and Celan and Grass and other post-war German writers, I guess I understand just a little about the terrain he's working in.

The Peter Huchel Museum (2020)

In writing, there are always those moments when you cannot make progress. Days when you pace round the room endlessly, around the material, when in actual fact you are circling yourself, repeatedly mouthing something aloud, to your ear, only to hear the same thing over and over again: it's not right.

- 'In the Anchor Jar' [p.113]

Seiler is the curator of the Peter Huchel Museum in Wilhelmshorst, on the outskirts of Berlin. He gives a fascinating account in the first essay in In Case of Loss of having to gain entry by breaking into the house - at the instigation of Huchel's widow - when the local council refused him permission to live there. Poet as man of action! I like it.

I may not be able to match him there, but (as it turns out), he's almost exactly my contemporary. I was born in November 1962 in Auckland, New Zealand; he in June 1963 in Gera, East Germany.

I remember in November 1989, when I was studying in the UK, watching the Berlin wall being demolished on TV as Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" blared out. It was undeniably moving: history as spectacle - but perhaps just a little too cinematic for comfort. As if we could only understand such things now in terms of Hollywood blockbusters, with the appropriate background music.

Seiler instinctively resists such grand gestures: his material is, of course, the past, as it is for all of us, but his past is a skein of particulars: the underground uranium deposits which made Gera one of the 'tired villages' of Thuringia, and gradually irradiated everyone who worked there; the careful way his father taught him to repair machinery, tools and brushes in perfect alignment, the two working silently together in the cramped workshed.

Art Deco in Mairangi Bay, Auckland (2023)

I, too, live in a kind of museum - but it's one that's consecrated to my family's relentless, acquisitive hoarding. No matter how much you throw out, there's always more left behind: my father's guns and militaria, my mother's bags of all our childhood clothes, Bronwyn's pictures and pottery, and books, books, books from everyone. Disconcertingly, it looks quite a lot like the Huchel House.

Perhaps his past isn't so different from mine, after all. In any case, he seems like a writer after my own heart.

Peter Horvath: Fall of the Berlin Wall (10/11/1989)

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Michelle Porte: The Places of Marguerite Duras (2025)

This is the front cover of the book Bronwyn's friends at the Objectspace gallery in Ponsonby gave her as a Christmas present this year. I guess they'd noticed her passion for decoding and interpreting spaces in both her critical and creative work.

I was pleased to see that they'd chosen something by (and about) Marguerite Duras, who's one of my favourite twentieth-century French writers. Not that I've read - or seen - all her work by any means. For me, until the mid-1980s she was just another name in the honour roll of the Nouveau roman, alongside such luminaries as Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. But there was so much fuss over her Prix Goncourt-winning novel L'Amant (1984) when it first appeared in English that it would have been hard to ignore it.

The laconic, matter-of-fact way in which she wrote greatly attracted me. The book took place in a Conradian setting, but the events were outlined as dryly as only a Cartesian French writer could have achieved. The lush external landscapes of Duras' native Indochina were taken for granted - the outrageousness of the actions she recorded, again, described as brutally and directly as in a police dossier.

Jean-Jacques Annaud, dir.: The Lover (1992)

But all that was lost in the movie, I'm afraid. I enjoyed that, too, but unfortunately it's almost impossible to avoid evoking Emmanuelle and its sequels when filming an explicit French love story in the steamy Far East.

Duras, though - she was clearly something else. I decided to try reading her next novel in French to see if it had the same effect on me. That novel - for want of a better word: it's really more of an episodic series of mini-novellas and notebook entries - was called La Douleur.

Marguerite Duras: La Douleur (1985)

How do you translate that? In French, it just means pain. Barbara Bray, Duras's most faithful and assiduous English translator, retitled it The War A Memoir. Not a bad choice, as it's an intensely painful chronicle of the heroine (virtually indistinguishable from Duras herself) and her mostly futile attempts to find out what had happened to her husband, recently arrested by the Gestapo, near the end of the war.

Paris has just been liberated. Everything is in chaos. The narrator lurches from office to office, official to official, trying to get any scraps of information she can. Virtually all of this actually happened - only the names have been changed. The book, however, ends with her still in suspense, whereas in actuality Robert Antelme survived his imprisonment by the Gestapo, and even the forced death march towards Dachau in late 1945.

I'd never read anything quite like it. It was experimental, yes: the multiplicity of levels and narrative styles; the constantly shifting viewpoints. But all of that served simply to convey the intensity of the experience. There are aspects of that, too, in George Perec's earlier, rather more oblique masterpiece W ou le souvenir d'enfance [W, or the Memory of Childhood], which also hinges on the war: in that case, growing up without ever knowing that his mother died in Auschwitz.

George Perec: W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975)

I'm not sure if I've actually seen the documentary The Places of Marguerite Duras is based on. Possibly not, because the documentary I remember watching had a number of scenes in it from her film Le Camion (1977), which came out after 1976, when Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras was shown on French TV.

The documentary I saw was extremely detailed, though - ranging from her childhood in what is now Vietnam, to the various regions of France she's also associated with. It gave at least as much attention to her work as a director as to her novels and other writing. She was always immensely prolific, and (dare I say it?) somewhat repetitive in the way she recycled situations and themes from her life and elswhere.

Marguerite Duras, dir. & writ.: India Song (1975)

One of the best examples is her film India Song, with its slightly time-lagged dialogue, never quite in synch with the actors' lips. A year later she released a film called Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert [Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta], which uses precisely the same sound-track, only this time juxtaposed against pictures of headstones and graves.

Marguerite Duras, dir. & writ.: Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976)

It's not true to say, then, that when you've read one novel by Duras you've read them all. Even when they traverse much the same territory - as The North China Lover (1991) does The Lover (1984) - the new text seems designed to question and even undermine the previous version.

Since the publication of La Douleur, for instance, Duras's original wartime journals have been found and published. The multiple layers of her reinventions still continue to unfold some thirty years after her death.

Marguerite Duras: Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes (2006)

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Marguerite Duras (1914-1996)

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu
[Marguerite Duras]
(1914-1996)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Fiction:


1. Les Impudents (1943)
   • The Impudent Ones. Trans. Kelsey L. Haskett (2021)
2. La Vie tranquille (1944)
   • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
   • The Easy Life. Trans. Olivia Baes & Emma Ramadan (2022)
3. Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950)
   • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
   • The Sea Wall. 1950. Trans. Herma Briffault. 1952. London: Faber, 1986.
   • A Sea of Troubles. Trans. Antonia White (1953)
4. Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952)
   • The Sailor from Gibraltar. 1952. Trans. Barbara Bray. 1966. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., n.d.
5. Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953)
   • The Little Horses of Tarquinia,. Trans. Peter DuBerg (1960)
6. Des journées entières dans les arbres: Le Boa, Madame Dodin, Les Chantiers (1954)
   • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
   • Whole Days in the Trees: Le Boa, Madame Dodin, Les Chantiers. Trans. Anita Barrows (1984)
7. Le Square (1955)
   • The Square,. Trans. Sonia Pitt-Rivers and Irina Morduch (1959)
8. Moderato cantabile (1958)
   • Moderato Cantabile. Trans. Richard Seaver (1960)
9. Dix heures et demie du soir en été (1960)
   • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
   • 10:30 on a Summer Night. Trans. Anne Borchardt (1961)
10. L'Après-midi de M. Andesmas (1962)
    • The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas. Trans. Anne Borchardt and Barbara Bray (1964)
11. Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964)
    • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Trans. Richard Seaver (1964)
    • The Rapture of Lol V. Stein. Trans. Eileen Ellenbogen (1967)
12. Le Vice-Consul (1965)
    • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • The Vice-Consul. Trans. Eileen Ellenborgener (1968)
13. L'Amante anglaise (1967)
    • L'Amante anglaise. Trans. Barbara Bray (1968)
14. Détruire, dit-elle (1969)
    • Destroy, She Said. Trans. Barbara Bray (1970)
15. Abahn Sabana David (1970)
    • Abahn Sabana David. Trans. Kazim Ali (2016)
16. Ah! Ernesto (1971)
17. L'Amour (1972)
    • L'Amour. Trans. Kazim Ali and Libby Murphy (2013)
18. Vera Baxter ou les Plages de l'Atlantique (1980)
19. L'Homme assis dans le couloir (1980)
    • The Man Sitting in the Corridor. Trans. Barbara Bray (1991)
20. L'Homme atlantique (1982)
    • The Atlantic Man. Trans. Alberto Manguel (1993)
21. La Maladie de la mort (1982)
    • The Malady of Death. Trans. Barbara Bray (1986)
22. L'Amant (1984)
    • The Lover. 1984. Trans. Barbara Bray. 1985. Flamingo. London: Fontana Paperbacks / Collins Publishing Group, 1986.
23. La Douleur (1985)
    • La Douleur. 1985. Collection Folio, 2469. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1997.
    • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • The War. Trans. Barbara Bray (1986)
24. Les Yeux bleus, Cheveux noirs (1986)
    • Blue Eyes, Black Hair. Trans. Barbara Bray (1987)
25. La Pute de la côte normande (1986)
    • The Slut of the Normandy Coast. Trans. Alberto Manguel (1993)
26. Emily L. (1987)
    • Emily L. 1987. Trans. Barbara Bray. 1989. Flamingo. London: Fontana Paperbacks / Collins Publishing Group, 1990.
27. La Pluie d'été (1990)
    • Summer Rain. Trans. Barbara Bray (1992)
28. L'Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991)
    • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • The North China Lover (L’Amant de la Chine du nord). 1991. Trans. Leigh Hafrey. 1992. Flamingo Original. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.
29. Yann Andréa Steiner (1992)
    • Yann Andrea Steiner. Trans. Barbara Bray (1993)
30. Écrire (1993)
    • Writing. Trans. Mark Polizzotti (2011)

Non-fiction:


31. L'Été 80 (1980)
32. Outside (1981)
    • Outside. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer (1986)
33. La Vie matérielle (1987)
    • Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jérôme Beaujour. 1987. Trans. Barbara Bray. Flamingo Original. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1990.
34. Les Yeux verts (1980 / 1987)
    • Green Eyes. Trans. Carol Barko (1990)
35. C'est tout (1995)
    • No More. Trans. Richard Howard (1998)
36. Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes: 1943-1949 (2006)
    • Wartime Notebooks and Other Texts. Ed. Sophie Bogaert & Olivier Corpet. 2006. Trans. Linda Coverdale. MacLehose Press. London: Quercus, 2008.

Plays:


37. Les Viaducs de la Seine et Oise (1959)
    • "The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise". Trans. Barbara Bray, in Three Plays (1967)
38. Théâtre I: Les Eaux et Forêts; Le Square; La Musica (1965)
    • "Les Eaux et Forêts" in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • "The Square". Trans. Barbara Bray and Sonia Orwell, in Three Plays (1967)
    • "La Musica" in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • "La Musica". Trans. Barbara Bray (1975) [in Four Plays (1992)]
39. L'Amante anglaise (1968)
    • L'Amante anglaise. Trans. Barbara Bray (1975)
40. Théâtre II: Suzanna Andler; Des journées entières dans les arbres; Yes, peut-être; Le Shaga; Un homme est venu me voir (1968)
    • Suzanna Andler. Trans. Barbara Bray (1975)
    • "Des journées entières dans les arbres" in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • "Days in the Trees". Trans. Barbara Bray and Sonia Orwell, in Three Plays (1967)
41. India Song (1973)
    • "India Song" in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • "India Song". Trans. Barbara Bray (1976) [in Four Plays (1992)]
42. L'Eden Cinéma (1977)
    • "Eden Cinema". Trans. Barbara Bray, in Four Plays (1992)
43. Agatha (1981)
    • Agatha. Trans. Howard Limoli, in Agatha / Savannah Bay: 2 Plays (1992)
44. Savannah Bay (1982 / 1983)
    • "Savannah Bay". Trans. Barbara Bray, in Four Plays (1992)
    • "Savannah Bay". Trans. Howard Limoli, in Agatha / Savannah Bay: 2 Plays (1992)
45. Théâtre III: La Bête dans la jungle; Les Papiers d'Aspern; La Danse de mort (1984)
46. La Musica deuxième (1985)
    • "La Musica deuxième". Trans. Barbara Bray, in Four Plays (1992)

Cinema

Screenplays:

47. Hiroshima mon amour (1960)
    • Included in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • Hiroshima mon amour. Trans. Richard Seaver (1961)
48. Une aussi longue absence (with Gérard Jarlot) (1961)
    • Une aussi longue absence. Trans. Barbara Wright (1961)
49. Nathalie Granger, suivi de La Femme du Gange (1973)
50. Le Camion, suivi de Entretien avec Michelle Porte (1977)
    • The Darkroom. Trans. Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand (2021)
51. Le Navire Night, suivi de Cesarée, les Mains négatives, Aurélia Steiner (1979)
    • "Le Navire Night: Cesarée, les Mains négatives" in: Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.
    • The Ship "Night". Trans. Susan Dwyer

Director:

52. La Musica (1967)
53. Destroy, She Said (1969)
54. Jaune le soleil (1972)
55. Nathalie Granger (1972)
56. La Femme du Gange (1974)
57. India Song (1975)
58. Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976)
59. Des journées entières dans les arbres (1977)
60. Le Camion (1977)
61. Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977)
62. Les Mains négatives (1978)
63. Césarée (1978)
64. Le Navire Night (1979)
65. Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979)
66. Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (1979)
67. Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981)
68. L'Homme atlantique (1981)
69. Il dialogo di Roma (1983)
70. Les Enfants (1985)

Actor:

71. Jean-Luc Godard, dir. Every Man for Himself (1980)

Collections:


72. Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas (1966)
73. Three Plays: The Square, Days in the Trees, The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise (1967)
74. Three Novels: The Square, Ten-thirty on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas (1977)
75. Four Plays: La Musica (La Musica Deuxième), Eden Cinema, Savannah Bay, India Song. Trans. Barbara Bray (1992)
76. Agatha / Savannah Bay: 2 Plays. Trans. Howard Limoli (1992)
77. Two by Duras: The Slut of the Normandy Coast / The Atlantic Man. Trans. Alberto Manguel (1993)
78. Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993 (1997)
    • Duras: Romans cinéma théâtre, un parcours 1943-1993: La Vie tranquille; Un Barrage contre le Pacifique; Des journées entières dans les arbres: Le Boa, Madame Dodin, Les Chantiers; Le Square; Hiroshima mon amour; Dix heures et demie du soir en été; Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein; Le Vice-Consul; Les Eaux et Forêts; La Musica; Des journées entières dans les arbres; India Song; Le Navire Night: Cesarée, les Mains négatives; La Douleur; L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. 1944, 1950, 1954, 1955, 1960, 1960, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1973, 1979, 1985 & 1991. Quarto. 1997. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2002.

Interviews:


79. [with Xavière Gauthier] Les Parleuses (1974)
    • Woman to Woman. Trans. Katharine A. Jensen (1987)
80. [with Michelle Porte] Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras: Entretiens et photos (1977)
    • The Places of Marguerite Duras. Trans. Alison L. Strayer. Introduction by Durga Chew-Bose. Montreal & New York: Magic Hour Press, 2025.
81. [with Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre] La Passion suspendue (2013)
    • Suspended Passion. Trans. Chris Turner (2016)

Secondary:


82. Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. 1998. Trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen. 2000. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 2001.

Jean-Jacques Annaud, dir.: The Lover (1992)

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Lutz Seiler (1963- )

Lutz Seiler
(1963- )

Poetry:


1. Berührt – geführt (1995)
2. Pech & Blende (2000)
   • Pitch & Glint. Poems. Trans. Stefan Tobler (2023)
3. Hubertusweg (2001)
4. Vierzig Kilometer Nacht (2003)
5. Poems. Trans. Andrew Duncan (2005)
6. im felderlatein (2010)
   • in field latin. Poems. Trans. Alexander Booth (2016)
7. schrift für blinde riesen (2021)

Non-fiction:


8. [with Anne Duden & Farhad Showghi] Heimaten (2001)
9. Sonntags dachte ich an Gott (2004)
10. Die Anrufung. Essay und vier Gedichte (2005)
11. Die Römische Saison. Zwei Essays Mit Zeichnungen von Max P. Hering (2016)
12. Laubsäge und Scheinbrücke. Aus der Vorgeschichte des Schreibens. Heidelberger Poetikvorlesung, ed. Friederike Renes (2020)
13. In Case of Loss. Essays. Trans. Martyn Crucefix. Sheffield, London & New York: And Other Stories, 2023.

Fiction:


14. Turksib. Zwei Erzählungen (2008)
15. Die Zeitwaage. Erzählungen (2009)
16. Kruso. Novel (2014)
    • Kruso. Novel. Trans. Tess Lewis. (2017)
17. Am Kap des guten Abends. Acht Bildergeschichten (2018)
18. Stern 111. Roman (2020)
    • Star 111, Novel. Trans. Tess Lewis. Sheffield, London & New York: And Other Stories, 2023.

Lutz Seiler: Star 111 (2020)

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Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro, dir. Frankenstein (2025)

In an earlier piece on Mary Shelley, I discussed Brian Aldiss's suggestion that she should be regarded as the founder of the modern genre of Science Fiction. The appearance of this new film by horror maestro Guillermo del Toro offers a chance to reexamine the question from a rather different angle.

What exactly is Frankenstein?

Leslie Klinger, ed. The New Annotated Frankenstein. Introduction by Guillermo del Toro (2017)

Well, on the surface, it's clearly a Gothic novel written in the mode pioneered by William Beckford (Vathek, 1786); Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794); Matthew "Monk" Lewis (The Monk, 1796), and many, many others - including Mary Shelley's own husband Percy, who'd published two such romances as a schoolboy: Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (1811).

But if that were all it is, then Frankenstein would presumably have long since achieved honourable oblivion along with most of the other specimens of the genus: except, of course, for Jane Austen's lively satire Northanger Abbey - written in 1799, but not published (posthumously) until 1817.

Guillermo del Toro's own work is (according to Wikipedia):

characterized by a strong connection to fairy tales, gothicism and horror, often blending the genres, with an effort to infuse visual or poetic beauty in the grotesque.

That list of influences - fairy tales, gothicism and horror - is certainly vital when it comes to defining his approach to Frankenstein.

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Anon.: Frontispiece to Frankenstein (1831)

As far as Horror goes, Shelley's monster certainly has a far worse temper than del Toro's. He kills Victor Frankenstein's young brother William, his friend Henry Clerval, and Victor's bride Elizabeth Lavenza on their wedding night. Worse than that, he contrives to frame a faithful family servant for the murder of little William. Despite his suspicions, Victor doesn't try to prevent her execution for the crime.

Jacob Elordi as the Creature

Del Toro's monster, by contrast, is a gentle pastoralist and an innocent victim of circumstances. He's constantly being blamed for murders he didn't commit, and even when Victor tries to kill him with a pistol - and instead ends up shooting his brother's bride in the stomach - Victor still manages to read this as somehow the monster's fault.

There's an inordinate amount of shooting in del Toro's film, in fact. Hunters, villagers, sailors - all seem to have loaded muskets ready to fire at the drop of a hat. Shelley herself is more sparing with the special effects, so the one significant exception - when the monster is shot by the father of a young girl he's just saved from drowning - has far more resonance.

Guillermo del Toro, dir.: Frankenstein (2025)

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Ken Russell, dir. Gothic (1986)

When it comes to Gothic, it's important to remember that despite our associations with clanking chains and gloomy old castles, it's a far more varied genre than one might have expected.

Yes, it's a repository for dream imagery and extreme emotions: the repressed unconscious of the Age of Reason. But it's also associated with hidden knowledge and forbidden lore. One of Percy Shelley's novellas was about a Rosicrucian. Mary Shelley's own introduction to the 1831 revised edition of her novel (the first to include her name as its author) sums up perfectly the fusion of these ideas:

I saw - with shut eyes, but acute mental vision - I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

It's phrases such as "unhallowed arts" and "mocking the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" which stand out here, rather than the scientific trappings with which she also adorns her story: for instance, "the experiments of Dr. Darwin, ... who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion."

Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.

It's worth noting that the word "scientist" was not yet in common use. "Natural Philosopher" was the only description readily to hand. Mary herself appears to prefer the term "artist":

His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

Brrr! That Mary Shelley certainly could write. I love that description of the thing's "yellow, watery, but speculative eyes" ... Not only was her story conceived in a dream, but her intention here - and in other passages - seems to be to recall the atmosphere of a nightmare.

Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare (1790=-91)

So don't be too misled by the affectionate parody behind Jane Austen's famous list of "horrid novels" in chapter six of Northanger Abbey:

"... Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

Not only are they "horrid", but they're also quite real. The Folio Society published a box-set of all seven in 1968, and followed it up a few years later with an edition of Ann Radcliffe's six novels in the same vein.

The Northanger Set of the Seven Horrid Novels (1968)

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Richard Dadd: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64)

Which brings us to fairy tales. There was a time when this term would have led us to visualise dew-sipping flower-fairies with diaphanous wings - the Cottingley Fairy photographs, for instance, along with the literature which inspired them.

Ever since the appearance of J. R. R. Tolkien's influential essay "On Fairy-stories" in 1947, however - reprinted in Tree and Leaf in 1964 - the concept of Faerie as a destination, rather than simply a species of diminutive, supernatural creatures, has transformed our approach to the subject.

J. R. R. Tolkien: On Fairy-stories (2008)

The statement in Wikipedia's Guillermo del Toro article that:

He has had a lifelong fascination with monsters, which he considers symbols of great power

applies, then, just as much to his interest in fairy-stories as it does to his taste for Gothic horror.

Fairy-stories, after all (whether traditional or literary) generally embody some kind of quest, and thus have a tendency to reenact Vladimir Propp's classic breakdown of the narrative structure of a folktale:

Vladimir Propp: The Functions of Folktales (1928)

Frankenstein's Monster is far from a conventional Fairy-tale hero, but he certainly has his avatars in the folktale tradition. He's a kind of holy innocent (or, if you prefer, Rousseau-istic noble savage). Both Boris Karloff (in James Whale's classic Frankenstein of 1931) and Jacob Elordi (in del Toro's film) play him as a creature whose innate good nature is gradually corrupted by the brutality and suspicion which surround him - not to mention Victor's primal act of abandonment of his own, self-created child.

James Whale, dir.: Frankenstein (1931)

Guillermo del Toro, dir.: Frankenstein (2025)

It's this aspect of the monster which transforms Mary Shelley's gothic novel into a more potent myth of despair and redemption. Anticipating Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by almost a century, she reverses the positions of Monster and Creator. It's Victor who's the real monster, in virtually every version of the story.

Víctor Erice, dir.: The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

It's for this reason that, in Víctor Erice's Spanish Civil War film El espíritu de la colmena [Spirit of the Beehive] - a masterpiece which del Toro constantly references in his own work (either directly, as in Pan's Labyrinth, or indirectly, as in the elven scenes of The Golden Army) - it's the Spirit embodied in Frankenstein's Monster who inspires the little girl to try to help a wounded Republican soldier.

Another avatar exerting a strong influence over del Toro's film is David Lynch's Elephant Man - in particular the scene where John Hurt, playing the monster, is cornered in a public lavatory by a crowd of angry townies, and quells them with a speech which Jacob Elordi seems, at times, on the verge of uttering in propria persona.

David Lynch, dir.: The Elephant Man (1980)

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Guillermo del Toro, dir. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Does all of this help? This labyrinth of references, this visual library of clues, this invocation of the great symbolic performances of the past?

I'm inclined, much against my will, to conclude not. Jacob Elordi's performance as the monster is flawless and intuitive. He stands with any of the other greats who've inhabited the role. The sublime Mia Goth, too, brings an unexpected breath of fresh air to an otherwise emotionally claustrophobic film.

Two faces of Mia Goth

There's so much to admire in Guillermo del Toro's film! And yet it's not, in the end, particularly likeable. It dissolves into a series of amazing set and character designs. Unlike James Whale's twin masterpieces, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), del Toro's version lacks the humorous exuberance of his own two almost criminally entrancing Hellboy movies.

And yet I'm sure that I'll watch it again - if only to savour Elordi and Goth at work - and, more importantly, I feel that it's helped to enhance my appreciation of Mary Shelley's genius. That her novel can still be such a source of inspiration two hundred years after it was first written is in itself astonishing.

Under the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that the most potent image left to us by all this plethora of Frankensteins large and small is that of a hastily married, recently bereaved young woman scratching away with a quill-pen in a villa by Lake Geneva, halfway through the notorious year without a summer, 1816.

Emma Jensen: Mary Shelley (2018)

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Guillermo del Toro (2025)

Guillermo del Toro Gómez
(1964- )

Film:

Director & Writer:

1. Doña Lupe [short film] (1985)
2. Geometría [short film] (1987)
3. Cronos (1992)
4. Mimic (1997)
5. El espinazo del diablo [The Devil's Backbone] (2001)
6. Hellboy (2004)
   • Hellboy, dir. & writ. Guillermo del Toro – with Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Karel Roden, Rupert Evans, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hurt – (USA, 2004)
7. El laberinto del fauno [Pan's Labyrinth] (2006)
   • Pan’s Labyrinth, writ. & dir. Guillermo del Toro – with Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ivana Baquero – (Spain / Mexico, 2006)
8. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
   • Hellboy II: The Golden Army, dir. & writ. Guillermo del Toro – with Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hurt – (USA, 2008)
9. Pacific Rim (2013)
10. Crimson Peak (2015)
11. The Shape of Water (2017)
12. Nightmare Alley (2021)
13. [with Mark Gustafson] Pinocchio (2022)
14. Frankenstein (2026)

Director:

15. Blade II (2002)

Writer:

16. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)
17. [co-written] The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
    • The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Extended DVD Edition), dir. Peter Jackson, writ. Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien) – with Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Sylvester McCoy, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis – (NZ/USA, 2012)
18. [co-written] The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
    • The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Extended DVD Edition), dir. Peter Jackson, writ. Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien) – with Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Sylvester McCoy, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis – (NZ/USA, 2013)
19. [co-written] The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
    • The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Extended DVD Edition), dir. Peter Jackson, writ. Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien) – with Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Sylvester McCoy, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis – (NZ/USA, 2014)
20. [story] Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
21. The Witches (2020)
22. Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans (2021)

Producer:

23. Un embrujo (1998)
24. Crónicas (2004)
25. Insignificant Things (2008)
26. Rudo y Cursi (2008)
27. Rabia (2009)
28. Julia's Eyes (2010)
29. The Book of Life (2014)
30. Pacific Rim Uprising (2018)
31. Antlers (2021)
32. The Boy in the Iron Box (TBA)

Executive producer:

33. Dona Herlinda and Her Son (1985)
34. The Orphanage (2007)
35. While She Was Out (2008)
36. Splice (2009)
37. Puss in Boots (2011)
38. The Captured Bird [short film] (2012)
39. Rise of the Guardians (2012)
40. Mama (2013)
41. Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)

Television:


42. La hora marcada (1986–1989)

    Wrote & directed episodes "Hamburguesas", "Caminos de ayer", "Con todo para llevar" & "Invasión"; directed "Les gourmets"

43. The Simpsons (2013)

    Opening sequence of episode "Treehouse of Horror XXIV"

44. The Strain (2014–2017)

    Wrote & directed episode "Night Zero"; directed prologue of episode "BK, NY"; directed Luchador sequence in episode "The Silver Angel"

45. Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia (2016–2018)

    Wrote & directed episodes "Becoming: Part 1 & 2"; directed episodes "The Eternal Knight: Part 1 & 2"

46. 3Below: Tales of Arcadia (2018–2019)

    Wrote & directed episodes "Terra Incognita: Part 1 & 2"

47. Carnival Row (2019)

    Original story

48. Wizards: Tales of Arcadia (2020)

    Wrote episodes "Spellbound" & "History in the Making"

49. Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities (2022)

    Showrunner; wrote episode "Lot 36"; wrote story of episode "The Murmuring"


Video games:


50. [writer & voiceover director] Hellboy: The Science of Evil (2008)
51. [director] P.T. (2014)
52. [character likeness]] Death Stranding (2019)
53. [writer & producer] Trollhunters: Defenders of Arcadia (2020)
54. [character likeness] Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025)

Books:


55. Alfred Hitchcock (1990)
56. La invención de Cronos (1992)
57. Hellboy: The Golden Army Comic (2008)
58. Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie (2008)
59. The Monsters of Hellboy II (2008)
60. The Strain [novel] (2009)
61. The Fall [novel] (2010)
62. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood's Guide to Dangerous Fairies (2011)
63. The Night Eternal [novel] (2011)
64. Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions (2013)
    • Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions. Ed. Marc Scott Zicree. Foreword by James Cameron. Contributions by Tom Cruise, Alfonso Cuaron, Cornelia Funke, Neil Gaiman, John Landis, Mike Mignola, Ron Perlman & Adam Savage. An Insight Editions Book. Harper Design. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
65. [with Daniel Kraus] Trollhunters (2015)
66. The Shape of Water (2018)
67. At Home With Monsters (2019)
68. Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun (2019)
69. The Hollow Ones (2020)
70. The Boy in the Iron Box Series (2024)

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Josef Astor: Guillermo del Toro's Movie Monsters (2011)

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3,000,000+ hits!

3,000,001 Pageviews (19/12/2025)

It took me 12 years to reach the first million hits on this blog. After that, it took another five years to get to two million. It's taken a bit under a year and a half to clock up a third million.

Why? I don't really understand it. I presume that it's just an aberration of the search engine rankings. The more you have been looked at, the more you will be looked at.

And of course there's that ever-growing mass of past posts to attract text and image searches - from bots as well as humans? That must contribute, too.

I've also added a counter in the side panel since I last recorded one of these milestones. Perhaps that's had some influence, as well.

In any case, here they are: three sets of statistics from 2018, 2024 and 2025:

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3,000,010 Pageviews (5/8/24-19/12/2025)
[1 year, 4 1/2 months]

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2,000,110 Pageviews (6/12/18-5/8/2024)
[5 years, 8 months]

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1,000,000 Pageviews (14/6/06-6/12/2018)
[12 years, 6 months]

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There are some other interesting features to observe. For instance, note the recent increase in traffic recorded on this graph:

Pageviews graph (19/12/2025)

What is it that happened around the beginning of 2025 to justify this exponential increase? The top locations for traffic seem to have stayed much the same - though the United States is more dominant than in earlier surveys. Perhaps the mere fact of maintaining a blog has become more of an interesting novelty.

Top Locations of Pageviews (19/12/2025)

No, what really interests me about these blog statistics is the large grey area among the "top referrers" of pageviews. Google search engines would, I would have thought, accounted for most of the traffic to this blog: but it seems not. The majority of the referrals are coming from - somewhere else; somewhere in the unknown reaches of the internet, somewhere in the grey ...

Top Referrers of Pageviews (19/12/2025)

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Bibliomania

Rebecca Rego Barry: Rare Books Uncovered (2015)

Rebecca Rego Barry. Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places. Foreword by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Voyageur Press. Minneapolis, MN: Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc., 2015.

It's always a bit difficult to explain the appeal of your particular fetish objects to those who don't share that passion. Why, for instance, do I find myself perking up with excitement every time I see a shop-window full of mouldy old books?

Others presumably feel the same when they spot a fine piece of pottery, or an old Meccano set, or a 1930s propaganda poster - and I'm guessing that each of those passions has earned its own name by now. Bibliophilia is the usual term for my own illness. When you've really let yourself go, though, I think it's appropriate to take it up a notch and call it bibliomania.

Recently I bought a copy of the book above from one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops left in Auckland, the Hospice Bookshop in Birkenhead.

Rebecca Rego Barry (1976- )

Its author, Rebecca Rego Barry, has collected together a series of anecdotes from booksellers and collectors about the most remarkable finds they've made in the course of their careers. Catnip to the likes of me, one might have thought.

Actually I'd have to admit that most of the stories are a bit on the underwhelming side: barn-found volumes of botanical prints, or obscure editions of Vitruvius discovered under a heap of old comics at a garage sale. Nevertheless, I dutifully read it from cover to cover: it was like hearing the distant voices of my own kind, fellow sufferers from this most inconvenient of ailments.

Why inconvenient? Well, because books - especially in large numbers - are so bulky, and heavy, and unwieldy; and so subject to damp, heat, insects, and a variety of other ills.

John Fenton

When it comes to the question of thinning out your collection, I thought I might share a few insights from my friend John Fenton's recent article "Lost Libraries — Biblioclasm: a deadly sin" in the Christchurch literary journal takahē. His essay touches on a number of angles to do with books, book-collecting, libraries, storage, and - what interests me most here - dispersal:

All ageing book collectors are forced to confront the mortality of their libraries, and the inevitability that most of these libraries will die with them ... Yet there is nothing that brings on the cold sweats in a bibliophile more than the realisation that their precious library, one that has been amassed over a lifetime, might soon be tipped into a landfill. There are surprisingly few antiquarian booksellers left in my city, and so the rats wait patiently for the day when they can nest in an association copy of a rare first edition ...

A friend once told me that he often lay awake at night, the prospect of his collection being disbursed to philistines too much for him to bear, or at least to allow peaceful slumber. I didn’t tell him, but the prospect is worse than that. Many of those beloved books are more than likely to end up in a skip. He was worried that a sharp-eyed antiquarian bookseller would obtain his best books for a pittance and sell them on at a huge profit. My fear is more aligned with reality. That a buyer or an auction house would be shown the collection, select one or two, and declare the rest unsellable. Books should be read. The idea of a book-dealer making a killing at my expense is of little concern, so long as the books are read and loved.

takahē 115 (2025)

I feel your pain, John - but at least you can contemplate spending your twilight years in the house you now own. We don't have that luxury. And when Bronwyn and I are forced to move, as we eventually will be, grim reality really will set in. We know not the day nor the hour, but still it will come.

John's account of the various possible ways of dispersing a large private collection is particularly relevant to this dilemma:

Having more books than I could accommodate, I knew the day of reckoning was here; it was time for a serious book purge. I needed a nudge to get started, and the nudge came when family members paid for a nice built-in bookcase. It was not easy sorting the books into ‘keep’ or ‘sell’ piles, but I did so, worried about the burden my children would face if I neglected the task ...

As I thinned, I loaded quite a few into rubbish sacks and paid a junk collector to take them away. He assured me that he would re-home as many as possible to care homes. Others were just binned — the dismembered and the commonplace. I had become a biblioclast.

I had also set aside what I thought were the more saleable discard items. I loaded them into my car and visited a few second-hand and antiquarian booksellers. There are very few remaining in Auckland, and those that remain face the same storage problems I do. One shook his head sadly at the sight of my boxes and rejected most of them. The ‘baby boomers,’ according to him, are the last book-collecting generation. His shop and the containers behind his shop were stacked with boomers’ collections. He had reached his limit. The second buyer I approached was closing down; now, a few months later, both are gone ... All that remains is the drawn-out hassle of selling piecemeal on TradeMe or eBay.

Bronwyn Lloyd: Jack the Book Maniac (December 2019)

I presume that the picture above speaks for itself. It's from a post called "Seven Stages of Book Collecting", one of many I've devoted to the subject in the past. It dates from a time when I was revising the purely geographical aspect of my bibliography blog. I'd already listed all the books I owned. Now it was time to map just where they were: on what shelf of what bookcase in what room.

Having already compiled such exhaustive data on this collection should surely make it easier for me to work out what should stay and what should go. Strangely enough, it doesn't. I don't keep books I don't want. All of them speak to me in one way or another. But there are, at present, almost 20,000 of them! I doubt I can keep more than a quarter of those - even that is stretching it a bit.

Marie Kondo, where are you when we really need you?

Radical Moderate: Tidying Up (2021)

Kondo now claims that that 30 books figure was a "misconception", but it sounds like she did actually say something very like it in her Tidying Up With Marie Kondo show on Netflix:

[In] episode five of season one ... Kondo visits Los Angeles to meet Matt and Frank, two writers who need her help in tackling their stacks and stacks of books.

While helping the couple to decide whether keeping the books will be “beneficial” to their lives going forward, Kondo states that we should “ideally keep fewer than 30 books”, a practice she follows herself.

I used to scoff at the madness of this idea, but now it's beginning to exert a strange fascination over me. Why not own "fewer than 30 books." You could keep them in a backpack! You could become a wandering scholar, like the Vagantes of the Middle Ages.

Helen Waddell: The Wandering Scholars (1927)

It's true that I've written more than 30 books (48 at last count - with one more in the pipeline at present), and wouldn't it be the height of hypocrisy to try to peddle my produce to people when I wasn't even prepared to give them shelfroom myself? It's still a nice fantasy to bask in, though ...

As I browse through my previous posts on the subject, I notice the slightly sheepish tone of "Crazy like a Fox" (2009) modulating into the straightforward denialism of "My New Bookcase" (2022) - by way of my 2020 encomium of bibliophilia-apologist and book-buying enabler extraordinaire, Nicholas A. Basbanes.

It's action stations now, though. I'm finally ready to admit that I need help. John Fenton's solution to his storage dilemmas was to get a new floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Mine would probably have to be something more in the region of Hercules' cleansing of the Augean stables. As you'll recall, the demigod diverted the course of the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the accumulated detritus of ages.

Greek Mythology: Hercules tidies up

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd furniture-van hurrying near
And, breaking our literate fellowship,
The uncouth shadow of the skip.

- after Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Bookcase"

Skip full o' Books

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All suggestions - serious or flippant - are only too welcome ...

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