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A review by libraryvee
The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar
3.0
Hard to rate: by the end, I had grown to appreciate Yourcenar's clean and elegant writing. She has a unique talent for capturing daily life in the middle ages and making it real; I didn't feel as if I was reading a novel written in the 1960s, but the 1560s.
The Abyss follows Zeno; a young orphan whose main character trait seems to be his disdain for everyone and everything except knowledge. You can respect him, but he sure is hard to like. Zeno's quest for the ultimate knowledge, and his time devoted to the mysterious study of alchemy, is dangerous. The Dark Ages are not a time to devote yourself to the art of asking questions - especially if it means questioning the Church, that all-supreme body that oversaw all.
Zeno's quest for truth leads him through the Black Plague (he works as a doctor) and beyond: he spurns meat and keeps his forbidden sexual tendencies as secret as he can. He tries to live solely for his own purposes; keeps his interactions with others to a minimum and befriends even fewer.
In the end, I thought, his character didn't change much. But the point, I realized, isn't Zeno. It's the world he lived in, the world we live in. It's the fact that The Abyss - this world of endless characters, this neverending wheel of time - it is not meant to change us. The "Great Transmutation" doesn't occur to us. We are the alchemical masters of fate - our actions, like Zeno's, change the course of the world; a spark of fire in the dark can catch and flame outwards.
Not an easy read, and certainly not one of my favourites, but in the end, I'm glad I read it, and it provokes some deep thinking.
The Abyss follows Zeno; a young orphan whose main character trait seems to be his disdain for everyone and everything except knowledge. You can respect him, but he sure is hard to like. Zeno's quest for the ultimate knowledge, and his time devoted to the mysterious study of alchemy, is dangerous. The Dark Ages are not a time to devote yourself to the art of asking questions - especially if it means questioning the Church, that all-supreme body that oversaw all.
Zeno's quest for truth leads him through the Black Plague (he works as a doctor) and beyond: he spurns meat and keeps his forbidden sexual tendencies as secret as he can. He tries to live solely for his own purposes; keeps his interactions with others to a minimum and befriends even fewer.
In the end, I thought, his character didn't change much. But the point, I realized, isn't Zeno. It's the world he lived in, the world we live in. It's the fact that The Abyss - this world of endless characters, this neverending wheel of time - it is not meant to change us. The "Great Transmutation" doesn't occur to us. We are the alchemical masters of fate - our actions, like Zeno's, change the course of the world; a spark of fire in the dark can catch and flame outwards.
Not an easy read, and certainly not one of my favourites, but in the end, I'm glad I read it, and it provokes some deep thinking.