The Priest Fainted: A Novel
Catherine Temma Davidson's roots as a poet are immediately apparent in the lyrical prose style she adopts for her first novel,The Priest Fainted. Describing the lives of young girls in Greece, where the unnamed narrator has come for a year, Davidson writes: "Girls helping their mothers to prepare simple meals acquire an unspoken knowledge in their palms and fingers. If you come from these villages, you must find your history in your body." Larissa, the Greek village she visits, "sweats in the plains, dusty and sedentary. Like a promise, the peaks rise in the distance, garlanded in gorges and wild onions, goats and streams." This closely autobiographical novel follows the fortunes of a 21-year-old Greek-American woman as she returns to the land of her foremothers and reimagines their lives and her own in terms of classic Greek myths. Food, (the book's title is the name of a popular eggplant dish), mythology, religion, and feminism are just a few of the themes Davidson's heroine touches on in the course of her year in Greece as she caroms between the personal (her Greek relatives, an affair with a Greek-American basketball player) and the political: the circumscribed lives of women down through the years. By the end of the book, the narrator has realized that no individual life story exists in a vacuum; in order to understand ourselves, we must understand those who came before.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.