The Golem and the Sad Girl

The Book of Splendor by Frances Sherwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this quite a bit. 4 stars.

In part, this is the story of a young woman who falls in love with a golem, and that's my favorite part of the story. Rochel is a marginalized young woman in the Jewish quarter of Prague in the early 17th century. As a child of rape, she looks different and is treated different, though a decent man makes her his wife. He's not a bad guy, but he has blind spots that leave Rochel feeling unseen and unloved. (He does love her. He just isn't good at it.) When threats from the intolerant Christians make them fear for their lives, the rabbi creates a golem (a story which is repeated in legend and is here treated as fact). The golem can't speak but he's intelligent and sensitive, and he definitely sees Rochel.

I would have liked more of their story. They're together on the page too little. The other characters are also interesting, but lead nowhere. We have the Holy Roman Emperor, who's crazy and wants to live forever; Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler; the alchemist John Dee; doctors; spies; a rag and bone man who is one of the heroes of the story; Vaclav, the bastard son of the emperor who serves him though the emperor has no idea who he is; and more. As much as I enjoyed them, most of their stories peter out, with their endings coming off-stage or omitted altogether. We don't get the scene when Kelley is hanged. We don't see when Kirakos and Sergey escape to South America. The final scene with Vaclav and the emperor on the sands by the river seem to hint at something, but I don't know what. And Rochel's story, with her husband, has a logical conclusion, but we skip most of the events that get us there.

It was fun to read, but a little frustrating in the end. I can appreciate the excellent prose, and there's an entertaining plot filled with memorable characters, but the loose threads and skimpy conclusion didn't entirely satisfy. I usually feel like books are longer than they should have been; I think this one could have used another hundred pages.

Anyway, I still liked it.

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Where Ovid Surprised Me

Metamorphoses by Ovid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here's another book I never intended to read, but I'm glad I did. And it's such a pretty edition--that cover is so nice.

I came across this at the thrift store. Impulse buy.

I found this surprisingly readable. By that I mean the original (Ovid's retelling of the stories) is quite entertaining and the translation is very clear and comprehensible. (There are also useful notes in the back which somehow I didn't notice until I was 3/4 of the way through. That was unfortunate--they're quite good.) Focusing on the source material, I'd say this is still pretty entertaining reading even in 2023. Interesting stories, interesting characters, lots of myths that one might know and might not...

Don't get me wrong--I HATE some of the stories. They're so unfair. Over and over again, one of the gods rapes a woman and then changes them into a bird or something, or one of the gods kills a dude for accidentally glimpsing them in the water or some other wholly unjust, criminal thing. I got so mad over and over when gods behaved very badly and humans paid the price, especially since nobody is saying "Hey, that's not right!" Ovid didn't. I only noticed one place where something like "the gods are not fair" is said, though I'll admit there might be more evidence of that if I scoured it from the beginning.

The cruelty and injustice can be hard to take, but it's a little easier if one reads it like an anthropologist, trying to understand the mind and the worldview of an ancient person living in a universe that is that cruel, that unfair, that capricious. I found myself wondering how we escaped that at all, and to what degree we have escaped such a horrific worldview. Reading it with that kind of mindset, at that remove, I found it more entertaining and less horrifying, more like a comic book or a superhero movie or a fantasy novel that is clearly not real.

And they're not all like that. Many of the stories are happy (or happyish) and don't require any special philosophy to enjoy. And the structure is very interesting. A lot of it is like 1001 nights, where stories get nested, and maybe one story gets forgotten for awhile and then we get back to it. (This edition does a good job of adding headers so that you can see what story you're in.) Though I won't lie--since I read this in small bites over many days, I often, even usually, forgot who was talking in each scene, who was telling the story. A more careful reader might want to keep notes in the margin or sketch a simple outline as they go, if it would help them keep things straight. But that's not entirely necessary. It's still good without such careful, critical reading.

Honestly, though, I'm thinking I might read back through this after enough time has passed to dig a little deeper into the stories and the themes. It feels like it would repay a second read.

Ovid's premise, of course, was to collect in one place and retell in a single narrative all of the most interesting stories from myth and legend that include changes--from human to animal or natural feature. It's kinda shocking how many such stories there are. So many rivers are made from the limbs of people or from the tears of someone; so many prominent rocks along the coast are the remnants of people; so many birds were originally people. That's just a common trope or motif in myth, I guess.

As literature, as I said above, this is quite readable, and I recommend it for all those who have seen it mentioned a thousand times here and there and kind of wondered about it. There's so much action, you'd be surprised how fast the pages turn. But get a recent translation like this one. Worth it.

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