Dracula, The Lake

Thanks to an amazon recommendation, I decided to read one of the original vampire novels, Dracula. It was with a bit of trepidation that I started the book -- after all, who doesn't already know the story? Who doesn't know about the vampire mythology? Would it still be interesting? Would it end up feeling overwrought and disappointing, the way Frankenstein did for me, or would it retain some freshness?

In the end, though, I found it to more than hold its own against more modern interpretations of the vampire legend.

The first thing anyone notes about Dracula is that it's an epistolary novel. This gives the novel an immediacy, and gives Stoker the chance to write from a first-person POV for some characters who will end up perishing. However, this style also has an obvious weakness. At first, Jonathan Harker's journal entries make sense in the context of a man stuck in a castle with nothing to do except write down his thoughts. By the end, though, we have Van Helsing scribbling down full conversations with Mina Harker in the hours while waiting for Dracula to show up -- and you have to ask, "Doesn't the man have anything better to do with his time?"

The other problem, though, is a bit more subtle -- there's a huge gap where Jonathan Harker travels back to England, but he's in no shape to write about it. How did he get there? Why does the Count let him leave? We never find out. (Oddly enough, I did a quick search on-line and didn't find anyone commenting on this).

I've also been reading Kawabata's Mizuumi, or The Lake. It's a story about Ginpei, a man who's haunted by some misdeed in the past, but really it's more about shifting perceptions. The novel slips between the present and the past with a fluidity that I haven't seen outside of Joyce, and that's particularly hard to follow in Japanese, where the tense system is less precise than that of English. But I think the challenge is intentional -- I've read other Kawabata stories, and this one is uniquely difficult to follow; his writing is usually brilliantly clear. Maybe it's supposed to reflect the confused mind of Ginpei. I'll write more after I've read more of the novel.