I listened to this book on my way home from my latest round of fieldwork, and it brightened a long, weary drive through rain and heavy traffic. It is 1910, more or less, and Emily Wilde is a Cambridge scholar of faerie lore in a world where faeries are real. She falls into faeryland adventures, as she must, and emerges intact largely because her great knowledge of faerie stories tells her how to handle every situation.
This ties into what is of course an old fantasy of mine, that if I were somehow transported to a world with magic based on the traditions of old Europe, I would be a force to be reckoned with.
Also, of course, our heroine acquires a faerie lover, because for a certain sort of (mostly female) author, romance with a faerie lord/vampire/werewolf/dragon/generic magical being is an essential part of the fantasy. This gives me a chance to wonder why this is not true for me.
I commented on this when I reviewed E.T.A. Hoffmann's Tales, that in the story where the main character chooses the daughter of the King of Salamanders over a mortal woman, I found the mortal woman more appealing. The mountain of superlatives heaped on the beauty and charm of the otherwordly woman did not move me.
I have considered various complex and arcane explanations for this, but I think it actually simple: for me the erotic is not about escaping from earthly, physical, bodily life, but reveling in it. And I don't mean just sexually; the most romantic thing I have ever done is have babies, which is as profoundly earthly and physical an experience as one can have.
1 comment:
A delightful read. If they make it into a movie, the fun will be in guessing who the two leads will be. Both characters have eccentric, opposite personality traits that play off each other splendidly. What a delight it would be to play one of them.
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