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A review by jduffy1026
The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson
5.0
Rating: 4.5
After recently being chewed up, swallowed, and spit back out by Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman (in the best way possible, that is), I have been searching for more of her wildly-unsettling psychological narratives, and, The Bird's Nest delivered. This story, like the former, pulled me in immediately and still won't let me rest even after finishing it.
The story follows protagonist Elizabeth Richmond, a 23-year-old woman with a tendency to neatly hang her coat and hat upon entering a space and do little more than that once there. A (very literal) shift occurs in her mundane routine, and soon Elizabeth finds herself a becoming a different person (or four), resisting the urge to throw herself down cellars, sleepwalking with no recollection, and blacking out during social events only to wonder what she could have said to offend everyone so gravely, all within the first chapter.
From here, Jackson masterfully takes her authorial voice for a trip among multiple unique perspectives, four of which reside within the protagonist herself. Each subsequent chapter follows a different perspective on the protagonist's plight with dissociative identity disorder, jarring amnesia, delusions, and imaginings that feel supernatural at times. I've heard it said that Jackson's strength lies in her purposeful ambiguity, leaving readers with more questions than answers and allowing you to fill in the creepy details for yourself, and while I think that Hangsaman perfected this and remains my favorite of her works, The Bird's Nest definitely follows suit for fans looking for more of this.
In particular, Chapter 3 may be some of my favorite of Jackson's writing, as she pulls you through a first-person, near stream-of-consciousness, unreliable narration that creates eerie experience like no other novelist I've encountered.
This is part three of my current Shirley Jackson reign-of-terror, and I have to say she is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.
After recently being chewed up, swallowed, and spit back out by Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman (in the best way possible, that is), I have been searching for more of her wildly-unsettling psychological narratives, and, The Bird's Nest delivered. This story, like the former, pulled me in immediately and still won't let me rest even after finishing it.
The story follows protagonist Elizabeth Richmond, a 23-year-old woman with a tendency to neatly hang her coat and hat upon entering a space and do little more than that once there. A (very literal) shift occurs in her mundane routine, and soon Elizabeth finds herself a becoming a different person (or four), resisting the urge to throw herself down cellars, sleepwalking with no recollection, and blacking out during social events only to wonder what she could have said to offend everyone so gravely, all within the first chapter.
From here, Jackson masterfully takes her authorial voice for a trip among multiple unique perspectives, four of which reside within the protagonist herself. Each subsequent chapter follows a different perspective on the protagonist's plight with dissociative identity disorder, jarring amnesia, delusions, and imaginings that feel supernatural at times. I've heard it said that Jackson's strength lies in her purposeful ambiguity, leaving readers with more questions than answers and allowing you to fill in the creepy details for yourself, and while I think that Hangsaman perfected this and remains my favorite of her works, The Bird's Nest definitely follows suit for fans looking for more of this.
In particular, Chapter 3 may be some of my favorite of Jackson's writing, as she pulls you through a first-person, near stream-of-consciousness, unreliable narration that creates eerie experience like no other novelist I've encountered.
This is part three of my current Shirley Jackson reign-of-terror, and I have to say she is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.