dajna 's review for:

The Aspern Papers by Henry James

4.0

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Spoiler

He is a publisher looking for some lost works of Mr Aspern. She is the niece of Aspern's lover, a centenary lady whose eyes are as bright as the first day they met Mr Aspern's ones. He's evil, sort of, and she's ingenuous, sort of. He thinks he's going to do everything he can to get the papers, even seducing the not-so-young maid. But when the time comes and he get caught in the act of stealing (well, attempting stealing), he run away, scared and ashamed.
The ingenuous woman, who nows what he wants, propose marriage in exchange for the papers. Maybe is not so ingenuous after all: the aunt is dead and she has no connections or means to sustain herself.
Obviously, he run away. She burns the papers, or so she says. Good act of revenge.

It's a decadent drama in a decadent part of Venice. You can picture the house and the garden, few minutes away from the city life, always in the shadow I like the way James creates suspence in his novels. This is as good as the more famous Turn of the Screw. I definitely want to read more of him