Our Lady of the Serpents
In a novel rich with erotic twists, like the sensuously entwined dance of mating snakes, Petrie Harbouri weaves a tale of love, lust and death; of rebirth and transformation. "Reality is a false refuge," the reclusive widow Chloe tells her lodger Robert, an Englishman taking time out from responsibilities back home. She employs him to tend her half-wild Mediterranean garden. It is a garden of secrets, abundantly fertile and full of memories. In it a passionate love affair once took place. Past and present are linked by a web of allusions, both poetic and religious, and beneath it all lies a sense of the oldest goddess of all, the abiding, ageless Earth Mother.
Harbouri's subtle and agile observational style provides insights into the feminine and masculine aspects of her central characters and the interplay between them. Our Lady of the Serpents explores and then subverts orthodox ideas of gender, uncovering a deeper, more existentially flexible, and possibly darker understanding of the ambivalence which can exist between women and men.
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