At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, originally published in 1932, is the diary of a nun, a Sister of Charity, named Sister Blandina (born Rosa Maria) Segale who spent 20 years, from 1872-1892, as a Catholic missionary and educator on the frontier of the American West. She was only 22 when she was sent to the small post in Colorado known as Trinidad. She eventually went on to posts in Santa Fe and Albuquerque before returning to Trinidad and then back to her […]
Ending the Circle of Revenge
We are chased into this life. We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to us. We’re always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich form the holy trinity of contemporary writers for me. They each produce impeccable novels on a regular basis, featuring strong but very human characters who are dealing with complicated and heartbreaking situations, and usually ending with pain tempered by some small hope. Race, […]
Perception and Remembrance
The Blind Assassin is Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize and Dashiell Hammet Award winning novel (2000) that spans the major events of the 20th century while telling the tragic story of the Chase sisters. It is an ingenious combination of history and mystery with love, infidelity, avarice, godliness, war and literary references woven deftly within. This is also a novel about women, class and perception, or misperception/blindness as the case may be. The novel is narrated by Iris Chase Griffen, daughter and wife of captains of […]
How should we live when the world is dying?
The Children of Men is a work of dystopian fiction with religious overtones. PD James steps out of her usual realm of detective novels/mysteries to ponder what happens to relationships (among people, between people and government, between individuals and God) when the end of the world is immanent. In 2021, it has already been 35 years since the last live human birth. For reasons that science has not been able to explain, humans worldwide have been unable to reproduce; they are simply no longer fertile. […]