what is the point of it all?
I just finished Mirror Mirror, by Gregory Maguire. It was ok. I feel like there was probably a point in there somewhere but I don’t know what it is. Maybe if I talk through the plot, I’ll figure it out:
There is a guy, who is widowed, and he has a young daughter and they live in Italy, but he is originally from Spain. One day, there are some distinguished visitors called the Borgias. These characters (Lucrezia and Cesare) are based on real people who lived during the renaissance. They were sort of like the de Medicis… the father was the Pope and they weilded a lot of political power. They were also flamboyant, attractive, and really big on incest. Those crazy Italians!
Anyway, the father gets sent on a quest to find a bough from the tree of knowledge by Cesare. He asks Lucrezia (who he is sort of blackmailing since he saw her try to murder her own child) to look after his daughter Bianca. Years pass and the father doesn’t come back. Then Cesare comes to visit and gets the hots for young Bianca. Lucrezia gets jealous and sends Bianca out to be murdered by a hunter. The hunter takes her out but doesn’t kill her. She falls at the foot of a hill and these weird, stone-like, dwarf-like creatures take her in, but she is in a deep sleep. They wait for years for her to wake up and she finally does. She bleeds menstrual blood all over them and some other weird things happen.
Meanwhile Cesare dies of syphillis and the father is helped by one of the stone-dwarf things and escapes from prison and gets the bough from the tree of knowledge and comes back, but his daughter disappeared 6 years ago. He goes off looking for her. Oh, and there is a mirror hanging in their house that the stone dwarf things made and through it Lucrezia sees that Bianca is still alive. Her son (the one she tried to kill, who is actually the product of her incestuous relationship with her brother, and is kind of “not all there”) finds Bianca and is tricked into showing his mother where she is. So she tries to kill her a few more times (one time dressing up like a giant penis). Finally, she manages to poison her and she sleeps for several more years. then the hunter who was sent to kill her finds her, kisses her and she wakes up. The end.
??? (baffled look). I don’t know what to say. I liked Wicked better. I’m also ready for a book that makes sense, so I think I’ll read Suite Francaise next.
1 Comment
November 1, 2008 at 9:24 pm
OMG, it’s so fucking obvious to me what Maguire is trying to say, that I’m almost embarrassed for you that you can’t figure it out.
Just kidding! Maybe mom could figure it out since she seemed to grasp A Wild Sheep Chase much better than us.
Perhaps the author has been watching a few too many Pedro Almodovar films, particularly Talk to Her, which involves a beautiful woman in a coma who eventually awakes and if I recall correctly, a giant vagina.