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Title: Berenice
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Narrator: Cathy Dobson
Format: Unabridged
Length: 23 mins
Language: English
Release date: 08-05-13
Publisher: Red Door Audiobooks
Ratings: 2 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Classics, American Literature
Publisher's Summary:
One of Poe's most disturbing psycho-thrillers. The deeply disturbed narrator suffers from an obsessive disorder in which he develops fixations on trivial and inappropriate objects. In this case, the teeth of his wife-to-be...with horrifying consequences.
Members Reviews:
Difficult to read
Difficult to read and hard to determine the significance of any given sentence. I still really don't know what happened.
This tale of horror can still raise the hairs on the back of a reader's neck.
Since there are a few dozen reviews already posted here, in the spirit of freshness I will compare Poe's tale with a few other tales, each of these other tales picking up on a `Berenice' theme.
Obsession
In `The Gaze' by Jean Richepin, the narrator peers through the window of a cell at a madman, arms spread, head uplifted, transfixed by a point on a wall near the ceiling. The doctor-alienist relates to the narrator how this inmate is obsessed with the gaze of eyes from an artist's portrait. "For there was something in that gaze, believe me, that could trouble not only the already-enfeebled brain of a man afflicted with general paralysis, but even a sound and solid mind." Indeed, as it turns out, the doctor-alienist is, in his own way, obsessed with the eyes of the portrait. Obsession in this tale is clear-cut and unambiguous, the level-headed narrator encountering two different men obsessed by painterly eyes.
Teeth
Toward the end of `At the Death-Bed' by Guy de Maupassant, a tale told by an old man reflecting back on an experience he has years ago when he and a friend sat in a room next to the chamber where lay the corpse of German pessimistic philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. The old man relates how they both heard a sound and saw something white pass across the death bed and disappear under an armchair. Terrified, they moved to death chamber. We read, "Meanwhile my friend, who had taken the other candle, bent down. Then he touched my arm without a word. I followed his gaze and there, on the ground, under the armchair next to the bed, all white on the dark carpet, open as if ready to bite - Schopenhauer's false teeth." And the next sentence provides the explanation: "The rot setting in had loosened his jaws, and they has sprung from his mouth." A horrifying experience for the old man, to be sure. But as powerful as his experience was, it had a completely rational explanation.
Split Identity
`The Double Soul' by Jean Richepin is a straightforward tale about a sixteen year-old boy who witnesses his father's death, a witnessing that causes him, psychologically, to live as two separate persons alternately. A doctor-alienist observing the young man in his sanitarium notes, "Undoubtedly, the duplication of personality manifested itself regularly, at two-year intervals: when the two years of one personality came to an end, the other was ready to come into play; between the two of them, one curious phenomenon was indispensable, a kind of mental trigger by which the first self-yielded its place to the second." Richepin's tale is fascinating but the fascination emerges from a telling where the disclosing of psychological facts is direct and unmistakable.
Let's now move to Poe's tale, which is, in many respects, at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from all three of the above tales.
