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In "The Fifth Sacred Thing, " readers fell in love with Maya Greenwood, the 98-year-old writer who led Northern California's successful 21st century rebellion against a racist, totalitarian regime of the South. "Walking to Mercury" takes readers back to the 20th century and powerfully dramatizes the forces that shaped this extraordinary woman.The book opens and closes with the middle-aged Maya struggling with a profound personal and spiritual crisis. The culminating factor has been her mother's death, and now Maya embarks on a trek in the Himalayas, intending to sprinkle her mother's ashes at the base of Mt. Everest and finally lay to rest her tumultuous past. At rest stops in tiny Tibetan villages, she reads diary pages her lover Johanna has tucked into her bag--the diary Johanna kept throughout their shared youth during the Vietnam era.In vivid flashbacks to those radical days, we accompany the young Maya as she awakens to the summer of love, joins the anti-war movement, and enters into a relationship with the abusive, alcoholic Rio. She finally gathers the strength to break free and seek her own true path, which takes her from the streets of Manhattan to the mountains of Mexico. Eventually she emerges, stronger and wiser, infused with the wisdom of the earth and the spirit of the goddess. Traveling through the landscape of memories helps Maya reclaim her past and foreshadows the miraculous events readers of "The Fifth Sacred Thing" know her to be capable of in the future.… (mais)
I'm really not sure where I got this book from, but when I picked it out of my book case I thought I would be getting a feminist sci-fi along the lines of The Handmaid's Tale. Instead I very quickly discovered I'd committed to reading a (gasp) literary novel.
I am not a spiritual person. At all. It's just not in my nature. So I found it really difficult to identify with Maya's struggle - she's lost her spiritual mojo and she's walking through Nepal with her mother's ashes in the hopes of finding it again.
As she moped through the mountains I found myself getting increasingly annoyed with her. You're in one of the most beautiful places in the world and you want something more? Just exist in the world. That is what there is. That is enough.
I wavered on the edge of giving this book three stars until the very end, where Maya finally faces the tangled relationships of her past and begins to put things right. This is where this book really wins. The relationships it depicts are raw and real and powerful, and I have to admit I spent much of the conclusion in tears. ( )
Disappointing as a sequel, since it lacked many of the features that I enjoyed from "The Fifth Sacred Thing". Technically this book is a prequel, telling the story of the San Francisco Revolution from the perspective of a 60s love child kind of a woman, into her crone years. Meh. Felt a bit too autobiographical / wishful thinking. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
The mountain demanded that she let all the barriers, the layers of protection, even the names of things, dissolve.
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Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Maybe every mountain, every desert, was once somebody's mother, somebody's bones. And to walk their steep slopes, to trudge across the dry plain to Mercury, was to step upon the shards of body upon body, crying out in their spirit voices, always calling us to awaken to their broken, enduring love.
In "The Fifth Sacred Thing, " readers fell in love with Maya Greenwood, the 98-year-old writer who led Northern California's successful 21st century rebellion against a racist, totalitarian regime of the South. "Walking to Mercury" takes readers back to the 20th century and powerfully dramatizes the forces that shaped this extraordinary woman.The book opens and closes with the middle-aged Maya struggling with a profound personal and spiritual crisis. The culminating factor has been her mother's death, and now Maya embarks on a trek in the Himalayas, intending to sprinkle her mother's ashes at the base of Mt. Everest and finally lay to rest her tumultuous past. At rest stops in tiny Tibetan villages, she reads diary pages her lover Johanna has tucked into her bag--the diary Johanna kept throughout their shared youth during the Vietnam era.In vivid flashbacks to those radical days, we accompany the young Maya as she awakens to the summer of love, joins the anti-war movement, and enters into a relationship with the abusive, alcoholic Rio. She finally gathers the strength to break free and seek her own true path, which takes her from the streets of Manhattan to the mountains of Mexico. Eventually she emerges, stronger and wiser, infused with the wisdom of the earth and the spirit of the goddess. Traveling through the landscape of memories helps Maya reclaim her past and foreshadows the miraculous events readers of "The Fifth Sacred Thing" know her to be capable of in the future.
)
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I am not a spiritual person. At all. It's just not in my nature. So I found it really difficult to identify with Maya's struggle - she's lost her spiritual mojo and she's walking through Nepal with her mother's ashes in the hopes of finding it again.
As she moped through the mountains I found myself getting increasingly annoyed with her. You're in one of the most beautiful places in the world and you want something more? Just exist in the world. That is what there is. That is enough.
I wavered on the edge of giving this book three stars until the very end, where Maya finally faces the tangled relationships of her past and begins to put things right. This is where this book really wins. The relationships it depicts are raw and real and powerful, and I have to admit I spent much of the conclusion in tears. (