Review date: 22/5/98
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1898
The Aspern Papers is a story of a scholarly obsession. The narrator is an expert on the (imaginary) American poet, Jeffrey Aspern. He and a friend are working on a biography of Aspern, when they discover that his lover, the inspiration for some of his most famous poems, is not dead as they expected but living as a reclusive old lady in Venice with her niece.
Believing her to have some papers which might make his name academically, and the direct approach to the old lady to ask for them having failed, the narrator makes his way to Venice determined to trick the Misses Bordereau (as they are known) into giving them up. He takes a room in their palazzo under an assumed name, paying an extortionate rent to do so.
The story is really about obsession, and its dehumanising effects; the narrator is prepared to do just about anything to get his hands on the papers - and he doesn't know what is in them, so they could be completely meaningless - up to the point of making love to the neice and attempting to steal the papers by rifling through the old lady's furniture while she lies on her deathbed.
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