characters

• Magda
  • Adheres to common beliefs
  • Experiences reactive irritation to being walled out (35)
• Emerence
  • Idiosyncratic interpretation of Bible
  • Does not yield to authority
  • Does not adhere to societal values
    • Not servile
  • Holds power despite quiet presence
  • Sees Viola as ideal human
  • Metamorphosis: deeper understanding of Emerence, makes up for judgment through fulfilling her needs
  • Gets angry when her affection isn't accepted
    • It wasn't the ceramic dog that mattered, but feeling accepted
      • Gift as extension of feelings
  • Exists independently in the collective mass of society
    • She alone is free
  • Anti-intellectualism stemming from disdain of propagandist's philosophy and hypocrisy
    • Values work, action, and sweeping over "idling"
  • Surrounded by death, and through this, she learned how to truly live
• Husband
• Viola
  • Animal as role model for humans
  • Prompt reflection through
    • Demonstrating incomprehensible actions
    • Tolerance
    • Understanding
    • Premonition

themes

• Identity
• Labels and their significance
• Judgment
  • Surface judgment versus true intent: garnet (81)
    • Wisdom, true listening and understanding
• Connecting with others
  • You don't know to cherish it until it is gone
• Modeled off a Greek tragedy
  • Fatality of love
  • Youthful naivety

motifs

• Time
  • As movement
  • Relationship between past and present
• Classical references
  • The Kindly Ones, Eumenides
  • Heraclitus
  • Jason & Medea
  • The Aeneid
  • Bacchae

questions

style & structure

• Frame narrative
• Confessional tone
• Weaves in different times
• Imbuing daily moments with fantasy to create surreal moments
  • Similar to the vibe of Don Quixote's fantasies
    • Reality created by the narrator

notes

highlights

For there was nothing offhand or casual in the way Emerence loved me. It was as if she'd learned it from the Bible, which she'd never held in her hands, or had drawn closer to the Apostles during her three years of schooling. Emerence didn't know the words of St Paul, but she lived them. I don't believe there was anyone apart from those four pillars supporting the arch of my life, my two parents, my husband and my fosterbrother Agancsos capable of giving me such unqualified and unconditional love. – p. 73

I know now, what I didn't then, that affection can't always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else. – p. 81

Once again her face changed. She was like someone standing in strong sunlight on a mountain top, looking back down the valley from which she had emerged and trembling with the memory still in her bones of the length and nature of the road she had travelled, the glaciers and forded rivers, the weariness and danger, and conscious of how far she still had to go. There was also compassion in that face, a feeling of pity for all the poor people below, who knew only that the peaks were rosy in the twilight, but not the real meaning of the road itself. – p. 142

I was dismissed. Viola looked up at her for his orders. Emerence put her hand on the dog's forehead, and he closed his eyes dreamily, as if there was no other way to respond, receiving a benediction that flowed from those fingers, so gnarled and twisted by work. – p. 156

"Now come back here, like a good girl. The master will have the radio on, he'll be listening to his music and enjoying the fact that Viola isn't home yet. Come on, I won't hurt you. In truth, I never want to hurt you. You're just slow, a bit of a thickhead. Why pay attention to my grumblings? Don't you see? You're all I've got left. You, and my animals." – p. 156

Can't you see that there's no point in trying to dazzle me? I don't want anyone unless they are completely mine. You like to put everyone in a box, and then produce them whenever they're needed: this is my girlfriend, this my cousin, and this my elderly godmother. This is my love, this is my doctor, and this pressed flower is from the island of Rhodes. Just let me be. Once I'm no longer here, visit my grave now and then, that's quite enough. I rejected that man as a friend because I wanted him as a husband, but don't pretend you're the child I never had. I offered you something, and you accepted it. You've a right to a few of my things, because we got on well even if we had our little tiffs. You'll get something when I'm gone, and it won't be just anything. That should be enough. And don't you forget that I let you in where I never allowed anyone else. Beyond that, I've nothing else to offer you, because I've nothing else in me. What more do you want? – p. 165

Now for the first time, the very first since we'd stepped into one another's lives, I saw Emerence without her headscarf. In her lightly-fragranced, freshly-washed hair, aged to a snowy white, I glimpsed her mother's glorious, radiant mane, and from the contours of her head I was able to reconstruct the perfect proportions of that other one that had crumbled away so long ago. Emerence, closer to death than to life, had without knowing it been transformed into her own mother. If at our first encounter, our very first, among the roses, when I wondered what sort of flower she might be, someone had told me she was a white camellia, a white oleander or an Easter hyacinth, I would have laughed. But now her secret was out, exposed as she lay before us, with nothing to cover her rounded, intelligent forehead, her beauty radiant even in careworn old age. The body lying in the bed wasn't so much undressed or half-dressed, it was above and beyond every form of costume. The simple, rational garb of terminal illness had translated her into an aristocrat. A truly great lady lay there before us, pure as the stars. – p. 194

What a fool you are! To the dead, it's all one. The dead person is a zero. – p. 224

The dead always win. Only the living lose. – p. 260