'Love gets in the way of death. Love is life. Every single thing I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything exists - only because I love. Everything is bound up with love, and love alone. Love is God, and dying means me, a tiny particle of love, going back to its universal and eternal source.'
“In Athens, they call me Aphrodite now. In Babylon, they call me Ishtar. But in the first days, I had only one name: Inanna.“
#firstlinefriday
It gives a good amount of information and sets the tone for the book. Not that it sets the world alight with literary beauty, but now that I'm 3/4 of the way through, I can say that it's a good indicator of the tone.
pickThe sequel to The Revolution of Marina M follows Marina through the civil war after the 1917 Revolution in Russia through the lens of the Silver Age poets and Maxim Gorky. Beautifully written, impeccably researched. Not quite as thrilling as the first book.
pickI just finished my third read of this wonderful novel. It follows a young female poet in Petersburg from 1916 right through the Revolution. She's the daughter of a liberal bourgeois family but she supports the Bolsheviks and splits from her family. It puts the reader right there at the heart of the revolution as Marina navigates this historical moment. There's love, there's heartbreak, there's poetry.
