A Very Good Book

Friday at book club, I picked up The Scapegoat out of the boxes of donated books. It had been many years since I read this book, and remembered thinking it was pretty good. So yesterday I read it again, and liked it better than Rebecca or any of her other books. I think duMaurier was one of the best novelists of the twentieth century. Or any other century, for that matter.

The Scapegoat is about a lonely Englishman who, trying not to think about suicide, contemplates going into a monastery. He accidentally meets a no-account French count who looks exactly like himself, and gets tricked into changing places with the count. I love mistaken-identity and identical-twin stories. Mary Stuart wrote one but I don't remember the title, maybe The Ivy Tree. And of course there's Dumas' The Corsican Brothers, and The Man in the Iron Mask which I haven't read but have only seen the movie. I like The Scapegoat better than others of this type that I've read, because the Englishman has no close friends or family and hardly knows the meaning of the word love. Then he gets thrown into the middle of a really messed-up French family and falls head-over-heels in love with the whole bunch.

Oh--Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey is one of the best doppelganger books; I guess I like it even better than The Scapegoat. Dickens had Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, and Joseph Conrad The Secret Sharer. Even old Dostoevsky wrote one, but I haven't read it. And probably never will.

A good movie on this theme, I think the title is "Dave," stars Kevin Kline as a stand-in for a U.S. president. And probably the creepiest story of this kind is The Picture of Dorian Gray.
*
Jed will be here tomorrow and Wednesday and will be working in Birmingham. Also tomorrow, they're coming to take the Lincoln away. I hope Jed gets here before "they" do, to help me get the trunk open and cleaned out.