I picked this paperback up from the new acquisitions shelf in the library and was intrigued by the central conceit of a young woman spying on three mysterious adult women. As it turns out, however, the introduction (read last, as ever) is correct to describe it as ‘not a novel to be read for pleasure’. It reminded me of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by [a:Charlotte Perkins Gilman|29527|Charlotte Perkins Gilman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1238281005p2/29527.jpg]. Both share a claustrophobic narrative in which a woman’s mind is stifled to the point that it unravels. In ‘People in the Room’ the narrator and the subjects of her obsession all remain unnamed. The former gazes in fascination across the street to see the latter through their window. The three mysterious sisters scarcely ever do anything or go anywhere, yet wholly consume the narrator’s imagination for no obvious reason. The narrator’s preoccupation with suicide and death, especially the death of the oldest sister, suggests that she is severely depressed. She attempts to befriend the sisters in a peculiar manner, one that is unsettling to the reader and likely alarming for the subjects of her fixation. She alternately considers them criminals, revenants, and tragedies. The intensity of her reactions to hypothetical incidents is indicative of her state of mind:

I remembered the new black dress I’d wanted to wear the first time I visited them, and felt touched to think that perhaps they missed me, and perhaps that very evening she’d say something that bore a likeness to my absence. Perhaps it would occur to her to send me a book. I thought of how awful it would be if they sent me a bouquet of flowers or a magazine. I felt capable of sending them back and begging them to forget we’d ever met, and, gradually, my resentment turned to tears, as I imagined myself in their drawing room, standing before the pale bouquet of their changing faces, shredding the flowers, tossing the magazine to the floor in fury.

“You ought to be ashamed, you ought to die of shame!… You ought to die!” I would add suddenly, as if the idea had only just occurred to me. “You ought to die!” I would cry. “So much talk of death, and you send me a magazine. As if you could await death while flipping through a magazine.”

The narrator constantly projects on the sisters. It seems likely that her obsession stems in part from a belief that their stasis prefigures her own future:

In fact, it was so often my fault that time and again I was seized by the idea that I too would gradually come to resemble those people who go about hiding something, sometimes even humbly, but almost always as if clinging to the small, proud consolation of saying to themselves over and over: “If only they knew...” Then I would gaze at my hands in my lap, as if someone had tossed them there, inert, like accessories to a crime, and to forget the sight, I would quickly unclasp them, start sewing something, polish a piece of furniture.

Flipping back through ‘People in the Room’ to find those quotes helped to crystallise my opinion of it: an accomplished and haunting insight into a character who lives entirely in her own mind; not an enjoyable reading experience. ( )

‘’To me, it always seemed unnecessary to watch a storm. This time, though, I had no chance to be angry because I forgot about everything, and unknown to anyone, just like that, suddenly, without warning, without turmoil, without dead horses, without any midnight knocks at the door or even a single cry during the siesta, for me the street had begun.’’

A young woman is transfixed by what seems an ordinary scene of domestic life. In the house across the street, clearly visible from the window of her living room, unhindered by shutters and curtains, three women are sitting, almost motionless. Day after day, they are there, like statues, frozen in time and space. And our narrator is bewitched. Seen as an escape from her own reality, she becomes obsessed and her passion grown once the first signs of life in the women’s company are seen. As she finds the courage to make her presence known to them and become their regular visitor, we start wondering. What is real and what is a dark fantasy of a disturbed soul?

‘’Arenida Juramento would always be - at least on first hearing its name, though later it could be other things - a dimly lit drawing room looking out onto the street, with shadowy corners, and three pale faces that appeared to be living at ease.’’

Norah Lange was supposedly inspired by the famous portrait of the Brontë sisters and constructed a story that dances over the boundaries of reality and the land of dreams and fantasies. Our narrator, a girl of seventeen, on the threshold between girlhood and womanhood, is highly unreliable and there lies the fascination of the novel. Clearly suffering from anxiety, her mind is haunted by the concept of death and, especially, suicide. Her mother struggles with her own problems and the girl has no one (or wants no one) to turn to. The three women become the centre of her existence, but is it a way out of her claustrophobic world or one more hindrance?

Lange’s novel is so strange and so demanding. As you read, you feel as if you’ve landed at the centre of a hallucination. We often use this term but here we’ll find its definition. Lange creates a hypnotic scenery and the characters of our narrator and the elderly sister (if we accept that the three women are sisters…) are very complex and provide much food for thought. And yet, we start all over again and ask the same question? Is everything real or have we found ourselves within the strange fantasies of a young woman? At times, we’ll feel as if we’re in a loop of observation, expectation and whispers of death. So, by the time you reach the last page, you’ll have to decide. I know I still haven’t.

Some have said that nothing happens in the story. Lord give me strength! There are books where the writing, the thoughts of the characters and the questions raised are far more eloquent than any ‘’action’’, the way they mean it, at least. If you’re looking for a Jack + Jill book, look elsewhere. If you’re unwilling to use the cells in your brain (grey or not..), turn elsewhere. For the rest of us, this is one of the most particular, enchanting, haunting books we’ll ever read.

‘’But they kept sitting there, in silence, and I wondered (it was impossible not to wonder), ‘’Who will mourn for them?’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ ( )