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Apr. 7th, 2007 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaReluctant Voyagers – Elizabeth Vonarburg
This is not an easy book to write about, because very little of what one might choose to say about the characters or the plot is necessarily true. The “realities” described in this book are as fluid and dream-like as Vonarburg’s exquisite and exquisitely translated (by Jane Brierley) prose.
Readers of Vonarburg’s English-language collection of short stories, The Slow Engines of Time will have read, in her tales of the voyagers, the seeds of this novel, but those seeds have travelled through both time and space, and grown in some unexpected ways, in journeying toward this nouvelle incarnation. The voyage begins in an alternate Montreal, where Catherine Rhymer, like her literary predecessor Thomas, is led by uncertain paths into an unknown reality - or realities - that will challenge and change her perceptions of everything she thinks she knows, including her own existence.
Reluctant Voyagers is a meditation on memory, belief and identity, an exploration of divinity, creation and mortality, an investigation of reality, probability and choices. It’s about the courage to step beyond boundaries, and ignore definitions, and the need to experience what lies beyond that drives some of us to plunge into the unknown, knowing that we may never go home again. It’s also an examination of the perils of refusing to change, to take that leap into the unknown. And it’s beautiful and it's brilliant.
This is not an easy book to write about, because very little of what one might choose to say about the characters or the plot is necessarily true. The “realities” described in this book are as fluid and dream-like as Vonarburg’s exquisite and exquisitely translated (by Jane Brierley) prose.
Readers of Vonarburg’s English-language collection of short stories, The Slow Engines of Time will have read, in her tales of the voyagers, the seeds of this novel, but those seeds have travelled through both time and space, and grown in some unexpected ways, in journeying toward this nouvelle incarnation. The voyage begins in an alternate Montreal, where Catherine Rhymer, like her literary predecessor Thomas, is led by uncertain paths into an unknown reality - or realities - that will challenge and change her perceptions of everything she thinks she knows, including her own existence.
Reluctant Voyagers is a meditation on memory, belief and identity, an exploration of divinity, creation and mortality, an investigation of reality, probability and choices. It’s about the courage to step beyond boundaries, and ignore definitions, and the need to experience what lies beyond that drives some of us to plunge into the unknown, knowing that we may never go home again. It’s also an examination of the perils of refusing to change, to take that leap into the unknown. And it’s beautiful and it's brilliant.