From last week

I had a couple migraines this week, so I haven't been keeping up as well as I should have been. For some reason, it was quite appealing to watch a marathon of "America's Next Top Model" yesterday. Nevertheless, I did spend a few days in the sun, and I can't explain how marvelous it is to have a job that allows me to be outside and read. I'm finding this book surprisingly easy to dip in and out of, because each event is told so quickly. It's not that the book isn't full of details -- it is -- but when you have to fit a woman's entire life in one novel, I guess you're choosy about which parts you emphasize.

There are a few notes I mistakenly omitted from my previous post. One, a reference to "stick and carrot" on page 34: Wiktionary tells me it's meant to imply a simultaneous promise of good things and threat of bad things; the horse wants the carrot in front of it and is threatened by the whip (stick) so it moves forward. The second is just an interesting quote from Athena's husband:

After my separation from Athena and the great suffering that followed, I wondered if I hadn't made a bad, irresponsible decision, typical of people who've read lots of love stories in their adolescence and desperately want to repeat the tale of Romeo and Juliet. (40)

As of my latest reading, Athena has met both her birth mother, a gypsy, and Edda, her mentor. We also meet again the book's first narrator, Heron. To strangers, Athena at first appears unfriendly and arrogant, but she manages to infect the minds of men and connect with like-minded women. However, she isn't so much arrogant as aware of herself. It's this awareness and potential penchant for drama that seems to cause people to be extremely mindful of what they say to Athena. She's easily influenced but hides her emotions, and with the delicacy of subjects in Athena's life, there's no way to know what the consequences of her reactions will be. " ... her eyes give nothing away, no emotion." (114)

On page 100, we hear Edda relate Athena again to a witch. "I could have explained that she was following the classic path of the witch, who, through her individual persona, seeks contact with the upper and lower world but always ends up destroying her own life--she serves others, gives out energy, but receives nothing in return."

Edda seems to know a lot more about Athena than anyone else, even after having just met her. Edda is full of those same ubiquitous morals, but thrives in the mystic. She talks of trances, heaven and hell, and fate. The trances Athena experiences, according to Edda, occur when "the body sets the soul free, the soul either rises up to heaven or descends into hell" (98). It is through these trances Athena attempts to get in touch with the "blank spaces" -- between notes of music, between letters of calligraphy, her sub-conscience. It's a dangerous place, Edda says. Athena most easily goes into a trance when she is dancing. She visits her birth mother, hoping that will fill in some of her gaps. Her mother seems to be intrigued by Athena; she watches her daughter sleep and tell herself "the ways in which fate changes people are always favorable if we only know how to decipher them" (115).

Athena's mother appears not to know that Athena is dead as she speaks to the "biographer." In fact, she assumes Athena goes on to live a full life, making babies and money. She ends noting that the presence of her grandchildren would mean that her mistakes in life would be forgiven because of her blood remaining on the earth (125). Upon reading this, my first thought was "well then I might be in trouble!" Here being one point in the "religion" of this book that I wouldn't agree with, even if I subscribed to its other tenants. Your forgiveness for mistakes and sins certainly has nothing to do with the ability of your children to procreate.