The Sibyl

One of the last books that I read in college was The Sibyl, by Par Lagerkvist.  The book won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1951.  I  remember loving it's power and challenging point of view.

It is a framed story, in which a man who is cursed by Jesus on his way to Calvary for not letting him rest his head on the side of his house, stumbles upon a hermit woman living with her mentally disabled son high on a mountain outside of Delphi.  The man bemoans the curse he is under, that of having to wander the earth, blessed with eternal life but cursed with being unable to be at peace.  He asks the woman whether she knows what it feels like to have the eyes of god fall upon you.

The woman replies that she does and that "There is no joy in seeing God."

The bulk of the book is the woman telling her story.  She was the sibyl (or oracle) of Delphi from the time she was a young girl to middle age.  During festivals and holy days, she would go down to the pit in the temple after fasting for three days, bathing, and chewing on laurel leaves, and her God, Apollo, would inhabit her body and speak to his worshipers through her.  The rest of the time, she lived be herself, only being cared for by servants of the temple.

After decades of living like this, on a rare visit to her family she meets a man, falls in love, and the God Apollo wreaks his vengeance on her for betraying her role as his bride.

It's a grim, but fascinating story. It reads like a parable--the write is clean and brisk and the mood is somber. It is unsettling.

The book closes with a comparison of the two Sons of God as they ascend to heaven - Jesus and the son of Apollo, the mentally-disabled man living with the sibyl.

I don't love the book the way I did 30 years ago--I guess I just can't accept the basic premise that the author lays out, that Jesus would curse someone.  Perhaps Lagerkvist's point is that the religion that became Christianity is neither kinder nor gentler than the one centered around the Oracle at Delphi.  Regardless of one's religious beliefs, it's safe to say that that action on the part of Jesus is completely inconsistent with any reading of the Gospels.

I'm glad I reread this book, but not sure I will tackle a third time.

This book was on my Back to the Classics for 2014 list and also counts in the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge. Huzzah!

First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intro - The Sibyl

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening of a book . Visit her site to see what others are reading.

I just started a reread of the last book I read in college 3x years ago.  I was talking a class on Ancient Greek life and culture (one of those "I'm graduating, let's have fun" classes), and the book was The Sibyl, by Pär Lagerkvist.  It won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1951 and it is about a woman who becomes the pythia (or sibyl) at Delphi.  She is the oracle through which the god Apollo speaks.

I remember loving the book, but I lost my copy shortly after graduation and only recently found another copy.

Here is how it opens.

In a little house on the mountain slopes above Delphi lived an old woman with her witless son. The house consisted of a single room; one wall was the mountain side itself, and always dripped with moisture.  It was really not a house at all, but a ramshackle hut which herdsmen built for themselves.  It stood quite alone away up in the wild mountain, high above the buildings of the city and above the sacred precincts of the temple. The woman seldom left the house, her son never. He sat within, in the half-light, smiling to himself as he had always done; he was now well into middle age and his lank hair had begun to turn gray. But his face was untouched; it was as it had always been, without any real features in its beardless, downy childishness, only that queer, perpetual smile. The old woman's face was furrowed and austere, and swarthy, as if it had been touched by fire; her eyes had the looks of eyes that have seen god.

It's a short book, only 154 pages, and I'm already almost half done with it.  It is as good as I remember. Interesting, poetic, frustrating, moving, thought-provoking.

Mailbox Monday

Very happy that the library emailed me on Friday to let me know that it was my turn to have a copy of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce.  I've been eager to read this since I first heard about it, and it fits in so nicely with the "walking on a pilgrimage" theme that I've found myself in.  I started it last night--despite being in the middle of three other exceptionally good books (North and South, by John Jakes, Sunne in Splendour, by Sharon Kay Penman, and Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope)--and I'm convinced I'm going to love it.

I also just received The Sibyl, by Par Lagerkvist.  I read this in college, and remember thinking what a powerful, interesting, innovative work it was.  I've wanted to reread it, but it's taken me until now to get a copy.  My college copy was destroyed in the great basement flood of 1983, which destroyed most of the books I had saved from childhood and college.  I still feel ill every time I think of those boxes of books floating in the basement when I came home after skiing to pipes that had burst while I was out.

Here's the Amazon blurb to whet your appetite:

THE SIBYL offers an opportunity to hear the work of a Nobel Prize-winning author (1951) whose work is not particularly well known in English. An old woman who lives in the mountains near Delphi is visited by the legendary Wandering Jew, who was cursed with immortality for refusing to let Jesus rest on his way to being crucified.

Sounds good, heh?

For other Mailbox Monday links for today, visit here.