James-A-Day: Count Magnus

By -
Varnhem Abbey
I hope you're all enjoying reading one story a day!  It's been fun for me to have just one story, like a snack.


"Count Magnus" is set in Sweden, and the protagonist is a travel writer; I get the impression that James mentally categorized him as slightly inferior and perhaps a bit dodgy compared to his usual learned gentlemen.  A little bit of "not quite our sort, dear"?  Anyway, Mr. Wraxall certainly shares the Jamesian taste for antiquities and relics, but he unwittingly gets more than he bargained for when he gets too curious about just what Count Magnus was up to.

Count Magnus de la Gardie was a real person (though I hope he never went on the Black Pilgrimage), and he is buried at Varnhem Abbey, which is pictured here.  I think if you painted the building white and shrank it down into a mausoleum instead of an entire abbey, it would look just like James' description.  There was once a church there too, but it has fallen into ruins.

I really like the description of the two spectres that haunt poor Mr. Wraxall.  They are more suggested than described--always all muffled up--and are quite creepy. 


Interesting discovery of the day: there is an entire podcast series devoted to M. R. James (that link goes to the episode about "Count Magnus").  I'm going to have to download it!  It always takes me forever to get around to listening to things, though--I can only really do it in the car, and usually my kids are with me, and they like music better than history lectures.  So if you are more of a podcast-addict than I am and you listen to it right away, tell me what you think.

Comments

  1. CatOctober 6, 2012 at 1:39 PM

    I'm enjoying one a day although I usually have to read them more than once - so much to absorb.

    I liked Count Magnus - I'm getting used to the travelogue and architectural descriptions that precede the main story (always interesting). Perhaps it was the name but Count Magnus had a vampire touch to it and I liked the use of the magical no 3 so often used in fairytales.

    If I have time I'll listen to the podcast.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanOctober 6, 2012 at 4:27 PM

    I'm glad you're enjoying them! And I did like the 3 padlocks, falling off one at a time...

    ReplyDelete
  3. GuillaumeSeptember 1, 2013 at 10:06 AM

    M.R. James is an amazing writer and a must read during the Halloween season.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more