Today I'm going to tell you about a book I really like! It is Edgar Poe's New Extraordinary Stories.
"We stand on the edge of a precipice. We look into the abyss, - we feel uneasy and dizzy. Our first movement is to recoil from the danger. Inexplicably we stay. Little by little our uneasiness, our vertigo, our horror merge into a cloudy and indefinable feeling. In "The Demon of Perversity", a major piece in the New Extraordinary Stories, this is how Edgar Poe describes man and his propensity to do evil. For it is in this dark, mysterious and at the same time authentic way that he defines man. Edgar Poe is haunted by the idea of the unconscious. In this book, where the reader wanders from story to story, forgetting himself in breathless descriptions, the author plunges us into the meanderings of his mind and sows doubt in ours. There is anguish, as in the case of the cat who is about to reveal the truth about the death of the wife of a hero in distress. Edgar Poe, as a good Platonist, wants to show his readers an idea of man that is his own. But this idea is not a set of clear and perfectly intelligible points of view. When reading these stories, one feels that man is constantly himself, but also what he is running away from. He runs away from himself, from the perverse spirit that dominates him and that he cannot absorb with reason. Even though Poe's short stories are constructed chronologically, the reader is not faced with a boring argument. On the contrary. What Poe wants to express is not only expressed in words, but also in images and feelings, so that the reader cannot escape from the characters. Thus, one can only escape from the pursuit of the almost horrifying mystery behind the mysterious William Wilson by running down the pages to the final line, which shows an eternal truth that Poe always comes back to: man never stops running away from himself until he finds his unity in death. Between the horror scenes in an almost haunted house (yes, I got chills) and the detective stories that put us in the criminal's shoes, Edgar Poe's short stories are anything but an ode to joy. They are about something else. Something deeper, darker, more elusive. Edgar Poe has found a crack in our mind and you can feel it. What he reveals to us by putting us on the side of evil is that we become attached to it and it takes us by storm. What he tells us by losing us in this avalanche of feelings and this internal sweat of the fantastic is the impossible recovery of control over ourselves when the spiral of perversity is launched. We want to know more, like the "man of the crowds" who can't help but follow a mysterious individual through the streets of London, like the scholars who try to awaken a mummy. The first lines of this article are very clear on this subject, and Poe delivers as much the secrets of men as those of the poet he is and knows himself to be, repeating, like an exercise in style, a new extraordinary story every ten pages... For me, this book is a real enchantment, a fantastic winter read!
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