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Random House
review by Judith van Buren
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review by Judith van Buren
With colors as luminous as a Velazquez, the pain of injustice as realistic as that reflected on the faces of a Ribera, and with images as grim as those Bosch protends, Kathryn Harrison's Poison paints a picture of a subject seldom explored -- women in the Spanish inquisition -- women in a poisonous world. The landscape is a departure for her. Her previous books have had modern settings and focused on modern albeit historically ever-present concerns, such as the abuse of children and their consequent quest for air.
Poison is set in seventeenth century Spain, when the inquisition was active and superstition was considered reasonable. It forms a background which helps Harrison get quickly to the heart of the matter: how does a woman live when every delight in life is regarded as heretical and every gesture toward love is crushed?
The parallel stories of two girls born on the same day are told. Francesca, daughter of a silk grower,
is doomed by her father's greed, her mother's illiteracy, and her own passionate love for a priest. She narrates the story in a cell below the palace where she is being interrogated as a witch. Above her in the palace, lives the second major character, Marie Louise, born into the sensuous delights of the Court of Versailles, and doomed through political betrothal to become Maria Luisa, wife of Carlos, King of Spain. The stories are told in contrast. Francesca finds freedom with a price, through sex, through words (she learns to read), and through her child. Maria Luisa never does experience freedom or abandon after she marries Carlos, except through drugs; laudanum which she uses to endure her husband and at the end, the poison which kills her and is her source of freedom.
Kathryn Harrison is a brave and wonderful writer. Though the plot could be called turgid and every line pushes the limits of ripeness, the novel never rots. Perhaps this is because the characters wage a ferocious fight against sterility, the moral backgound of this novel.
Look at Carlos, the impotent King who must father a child. He has been fed all his life by a retinue of wet nurses in order to keep him free of earthly impurity. After all, he is the king.
Carlos sipped milk from his cup, milk that after it was collected from the wet nurse had been taken to the kitchen and boiled on the stove for twenty-four minutes precisely, twelve rotations of the sandglass and no more, no less. Cooled at room temperature, strained with a cheesecloth, served in a goblet.His dinner.In contrast, there is this glorious description of a mother's love for her child:
The sun was shining brightly. It revealed a fine tracing of gold hairs all over his body, his back, his arms and legs. The hairs were almost too fine to see individually, but gave to his whole form a shimmer, a luster, as if he were a celestial creature: something revealed by a trick of the light, something that would disappear if I blinked. I uncurled his fist under the bright spring sky, turned it up to the sun, tasted it with my tongue, looked at it.The novel is as perfect as a ripe fruit. And though the subject matter is frightening and makes us uncomfortable, Kathyrn Harrison touches fully on our human desire and shows us how much, in spite of our fears, we have it, are stuck with it, and can either delight in it or die.
