La cassa oblunga / The Oblong Box

by Edgar Allan Poe

Durante il viaggio in mare a bordo della Independence, l’anonimo narratore ritrova il vecchio amico Cornelius Wyatt, accompagnato dalla moglie e dalle due sorelle. La cosa strana è che Wyatt si è fatto riservare una stanza in più a bordo dell’ una per le due sorelle e l’altra condivisa con la moglie e una cassa di legno che emana un forte odore. Un racconto esemplare che conferma la maestria di Poe nella narrativa del mistero e del brivido.

31 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 16, 2023

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[Marzia · Rating 1 out of 5]

"La cassa oblunga" E. A. Poe: 2
Non mi aspettavo di farmela sotto dalla paura, ma almeno una trama sì.
Charleston (Carolina del Sud) - New York 1840 circa
Il protagonista, a bordo dell'Independence in viaggio verso New York, incontra Cornelius Wyatt, un suo vecchio amico con la famiglia, e inizia a farsi i cazzi suoi. Cornelius Wyatt sta trasportando una cassa oblunga e il protagonista, curioso come una scimmia, fa di tutto per scoprirne il contenuto. La nave viene investita da una tempesta che ne causa l'inabissamento e i passeggeri riescono a malapena a salvarsi a bordo delle scialuppe. Cornelius decide di tornare sulla nave per portare in salvo la misteriosa cassa e muore provandoci. Una volta tratti in salvo, il protagonista scopre dal capitano che la cassa conteneva il cadavere dell'amata moglie di Cornelius, morta improvvisamente in viaggio, e che l'uomo la stava trasportando a casa in gran segreto per darle degna sepoltura. Per non suscitare scalpore negli altri passeggeri che avrebbero cancellato il viaggio piuttosto che viaggiare in compagnia di un cadavere a bordo, decide di inscenare una recita assoldando la propria cameriera nel ruolo di moglie e di imbarcare la cassa da morto come un semplice bagaglio a mano.
Con il senno di poi in effetti portava davvero sfiga viaggiare con un cadavere a bordo.