| God's Snake Contributor(s): Spanidou, Irini (Author) |
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ISBN: 0375702865 ISBN-13: 9780375702860 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group OUR PRICE: $14.25 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 1998 Annotation: This electrifying novel -- vastly praised upon its first publication in 1986 -- is set amid the arid landscape and stony resentments of postwar Greece. God's Snake reveals the drama of an inventive, courageous young girl and her parents -- a tyrannical army officer and his beautiful, unyielding wife -- as it unfolds with the intensity of a classical myth, one that demonstrates both the power of love and the terrible inevitability of its betrayal. As Anna indefatigably tries to claim her parents' affections, she encounters people and animals that suggest the figures of a revelatory dream: murdered snakes, a poetry-loving general, a beautiful girl with a tubercular mother, a loving dog that dies of cruelty and neglect, a frozen crow that comes back to life. Filled with passion, magic, and terror, God's Snake is a triumph by a writer of visionary authority. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Coming Of Age - Fiction | Literary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 98018170 |
| Physical Information: 0.55" H x 5.5" W x 8.5" (0.69 lbs) 240 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 1900-1949 - Chronological Period - 1940's - Cultural Region - Greece - Cultural Region - Mediterranean |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: "Remarkably fresh and vigorous . . . an impressive achievement."--The New York Times Book Review Set amid the arid landscape and stony resentments of Greece in the aftermath of its bloody civil war, this electrifying novel unfolds a series of interconnecting modern-day fables about childhood and family, love and betrayal. God's Snake is the story of the inventive, courageous Anna, a young girl who has inherited both the skepticism of classical Athens and the fierce stoicism of Sparta. It is also the story of Anna's parents: her mother, a woman as remote as she is seductive, and her father, a misogynist army officer who, when Anna cries, tells her, "we are not born to be comforted." As Anna picks her way through this emotional minefield, she encounters people and animals that possess the revelatory powers of figures in a dream: the snakes her father's adjutant kills as emissaries of the Devil, a poetry-loving general; a haunted girl whose mother dies of tuberculosis; a frozen crow that miraculously comes back to life, God's Snake is a work filled with passion, magic, and terror, conceived by a novelist of visionary authority. |