Fetch The Mists Of Avalon: Avalon Book 7 (Audio Cassettes) Translated By Marion Zimmer Bradley Presented As Copy
favorite fantasy novel written by sitelinka serial rapist and childabuser, Now that I think about it, I'm interested to remember that the person who recommended it to me was also a big fan of Nietzsche, Well, there I go again sniffling and crying through the lastpages over a bunch of fictional characters that I feel I know better then some real people.
If ever there was a book to make me believe in the power of magic, then Bradley cast her spell over me when she penned this book.
What a sap I am, and what a sap I'll be again the next time I read this, . .
Maybe I was fooled by Hallmark's production, Merlin, and I expected Morgaine to have a backbone to call her own.
Zimmer Bradley took whatever hope I had of finding yet another female character to favore and crushed them Morgaine is obsessed with who everyone marries and who gives birth to who as badly as the simple 'foolish' women she describes contemptly.
The constant religious conversations were getting boring by the ninehundredth time they were run and Zimmer Bradley's constant obsession wit not taking sides or making too many snapping comments of christianity were annoying.
Bradley gives no one a truely happy ending nor a revenge to any of the 'bad' characters and so leaves the reader with a sense of bitter dissappointment.
Sure, it was nice to read about the very early days of postRoman england, but for god's sake I could have picked up a history book and not this waste of time, energy and paper.
The Arthur myth from the point of view of Morgaine le Fay, pagan priestess, Supposedly a feminist take on the old legends, There is one main problem with this approach: let's face it, women's lives in the dark ages were pretty boring, And rather than break out of this mold with strong female characters, Bradley talks a lot about spinning, weaving, and having babies, The female characters are either contemptible or irritating, or both, The male characters are cardboardArthur is as heroic as a limp dishrag, Merlin just an old man sitting in his rocking chair, The paganChristian thing is overwrought and shrill, devolving mostly into interminable theological debates between characters that cover the same ground over and over and over again.
A lot of things irritated me about this book, but nothing more than the simple lack of a compelling narrative construction, Nothing happens. There is dialogue, which mostly rehashes things that were already talked about, And then there is monologue, in which the weak and mostly contemptible characters thrash around in their heads so much that it would make Dostoyevsky cringe.
It makes me angry that you could even try to tell the Arthurian legendeven from a feminine point of viewwithout looking at the epic clashes between the knights of the round table and their enemies.
Horrendously disappointing. For a fantasy novel, George R, R. Martin's sitelinkA Game of Thrones does everything that this book tries to do, and does it ten times better, For more of a historical view, Bernard Cornwell's sitelinkThe Last Kingdom is a much more fun and interesting look at the clash of Christian and pagan civilizations, and even has characters that you don't hate.
Wow, this is a truly epic retelling of the Arthurian legends epic in length atpages, epic in scale at spanning three to four generations, and epic in its ambition to provide a feminist reinterpretation of a decidedly masculine mythology.
I wish I could say it was an epic success, Instead, Mists of Avalon meanders too much, treading the same ground again and again, almost as if the plot itself has gotten lost in the mists.
Over and over, pagan and Christian characters debate the oneness of God/the Goddess, Over and over, female characters ponder the unfairness of life in a patriarchal society, Bradley rarely shows instead, she tells, And tells. And tells. She tells in dialogue. She tells in internal monologue, She tells in narration.
What keeps the book moving is Bradley's writing style, both formal enough to suit an Arthurian epic, but readable and engaging enough to pull the reader through endless paragraphs of court politics.
She develops deep and intriguing characters who change as the years pass, The book seems to be moving to a major resolution of the longsimmering conflict between paganism and Christianity, But the resolution happens almost despite itself, There's no real climax, at least none befitting a book of this length and scope,
And finally, there are the questions of religion and sex issues that come up because of the author, who was an outspoken pagan while also implicated in both her husband's ongoing sexual abuse of children and eventually accused by her own daughter of molestation.
Mists of Avalon simply can't avoid these facts, First, Bradley makes no effort to present a fair view of Christianity even accepting that any work told from the perspective of Morgaine of the Fairies is not going to be proChristian and acknowledging that Christian practices in converting pagan tribes were often coercive if not violent, Bradley's portrayal is so lopsided as to be cartoonish.
The character of Gwenwhyfar seems created almost entirely to be the whipping boy for pagan tolerance over and against Christian prudery and narrowmindedness,
Regarding the allegations against Bradley, I feel deeply flawed humans can still create great art even art that transcends the initial offenses of its creators to become a force for good within the world.
Unfortunately, that's not the case here, In fact, Bradley's deeply troubling views of sex and consent taint this work, as she glorifies incest, promiscuity and rape as part of an idyllic faith free of Christian ignorance.
Certainly, I'm not asking for a book to uphold a conservative Christian view of sex, where all of the characters improbably wait until they are married and never cheat on their spouses.
But for a book to be truly feminist in orientation, it seems it should advocate at least a little for the agency of its women, rather than forcing the characters to portray their own subjugation into sexual relationships with family members and older men as somehow liberating.
Most disturbing, the one unequivocally negative portrayal of a sexual conquest smacks more than a little of "she had it coming.
" At times, Bradley questions patriarchal notions of sexuality, pointing out again, telling multiple times, rather than showing that women who take younger men as partners are vilified as sluts while men who take younger women are glorified for their conquests.
But overall, Bradley seems enslaved to patriarchal notions of sexuality more than rising above them,
In the end, I appreciate the effort, but even as I write this review, I've talked myself down from three to two, It was just OK, and it could have been so much more, I enjoyed aspects of the book, and I never seriously entertained stopping it, but by the end I was seriously disappointed, Maybe even epically. An excellent Arthurian saga.
Written from the point of view of Morgaine, Arthur's halfsister and the villian of traditional Arthur tales,
Unique in perspective with strong female characters, It is a story of love and quite different from any Arthur novel you'll ever read,
Marion Zimmer Bradley's best work, She paints a vivid picture, rich with depth of characters and relationships,
One of my favorites, I can read this over and over again,
Not that the blurb gives away much of this book and not that I was even remotely interested in it, but a review came up on my feed of someone blacklisting this book.
Curious, I clicked the links to work out why,
Here is one which I feel is most impactful: sitelink net/marionzimmerbrad
To summarise though, this author supports her husband who was a known pedophile, The above link shows her daughter saying the author herself molested her the daughter, So, to all my friends who want to read this or any of the author's other books, I would strongly suggest not to support a monster.
If anyone has anyone more information on this or if I am wrong on any counts, please let me know, I am just absolutely horrified by what I have read and felt I should share, Yes, I've read it, but I'm reading it again, . .years later!
Remains on my Toplifetime great reads!! InI joined Goodreads and wrote reviews of some of the books that had most transformed me as a reader.
I have since, over the years, taken an absurd amount of geek pride that my review of this book is I think the most popular one.
And for everyone writing "GET OVER YOURSELF" in the comments, as a response to my using my own little corner of the internet to tell a story about how my life as a writer and a Catholic and a woman was shaped by this book, there were a dozen other women responding "OH MY GOD, ARE YOU ME" I love that.
I love this weird little internet minicommunity we've built out of being weirdo outcast girls who felt inspired and empowered by this book about a weirdo outcast girl who becomes a raging badass.
And then today I read this: sitelink teleread. com/writing/mario
And this: sitelink net/marionzimmerbrad
And this: sitelink net/marionzimmerbrad
And this: sitelink theguardian. com/books/
And about twenty more,
Every consumer
of art gets to decide for themselves how much the life of the artist matters to them, Sometimes brilliant creative geniuses are assholes, Sometimes they're criminals. Sometimes that makes a difference to how you read their work, Sometimes it doesn't.
The words of twentysixyearold me, pouring forth my passionate love for MZB's words, remain untouched and unedited below, Because that story, of how I fell in love with that book as a child, is still a true story, I haven't decided whether I will reread this book again, whether I will keep it or get rid of it, knowing the things I know now about the woman who wrote it.
And I'm not telling you what you should do,
But MZB's daughter says out loud not only that her mother abused her, but that part of the reason she hid that abuse was because of MZB's status in the SFF community as a champion of women.
Because she didn't think anyone would believe her, Because this is an important feminist work, Because her mother's fans would be angry at her for accusing their icon of such horrors,
And I won't be complicit in that,
Claire Willett June,
ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW
You have to be a particular kind of girl to fall in love with this book the way I did.
You have to be in the sixth grade, a freakishly precocious reader, whose beloved sixthgrade teacher brings a box of her ten favorite books to class and sets them up on the chalkboard and leaves them there for weeks for you to look at, including one HUGE book that looks like it's a billion pages long with some cool fairy priestess chick on a horse on the cover.
You have to have grown up reading King Arthur stories and LOVE the movie "The Sword In the Stone, "
You have to be so hopelessly nerdy that you would rather sit on the side of the playground reading than play kickball, never mind how much the other kids make fun of you about it.
You have to be Catholic enough to understand the mentality of the occasionally hateful Christian characters in the book as well as to be baffled and perplexed by all the sexuality which will make a number of plot elements only make sense to you when you reread the book as a college student and go, "Ohhhhh.
Now I get it".
You have to be the kind of girl who loves and relates to the plain outcast Morgaine who is treated as a freak has to learn how to rely on herself alone.
You have to hate the shallow blonde princesses, even when they seem like they might be kind of nice people, and always root for the feisty brunette.
You have to be a fantasy geek who LOVES any book with swordfighting, magic, princesses, and doomed romance,
You have to be patient enough to readpages that cover one woman's entire lifetime from before her birth to old, old age,
You have to come to the end of the book and secretly wish that despite your religious conviction in your Catholic upbringing Britain had never been Christianized and we were all still witches.
You have to secretly wish you belonged to a mystical female cult where you had to have a blue crescent moon tattooed on your forehead.
You have to wish you knew how to ride a horse in a dress and look majestic, instead of falling off every time you were forced onto a horse at camp or on vacation and now you hate them and they scare you.
.