I READ THIS BOOK YEARS AND YEARS AGO. It is not exactly a favourite. I remember feeling that the story dragged on—perhaps to mimic the opera? (bad joke)—and that the first-person narrator came across as icy and detached. Passionless, when the story ought to have been full of yearning, intensity and anguish. And yet the writing was beautiful, so beautiful. A cold, haunting beauty.
Haunting, as I often think about these particular lines about Persephone when I am in a city park:
The underworld is not a place for the living, and those who try to enter are, until they leave, in terrible peril. They are asked to have a very pure heart. The only living girl to ever leave was made to return half the year for eternity, married off to the King of Hell, as she had eaten something there before she left.
I would joke the entrance was in Paris, in the Bois, until I was nearly sure of it, and then I never made the joke again. But let us say it is there, for the sake of argument, or the story, or what have you. Say it is there and now come in.
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