No Pictures In My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily [Paperback]

Susan Caperna Lloyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1992

"A hauntingly beautiful story. Susan Lloyd's search for the remaining vestiges of the Dark Goddess in modern Sicily held me spellbound".--Demetra George, author of "Mysteries of a Dark Moon". (Prayers/Devotions/Spirituality)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Part travelogue, part personal quest and part exploration of women's roles in Sicily, Lloyd's story is intriguing but thin. A documentary filmmaker, Lloyd goes to Italy to find her roots, winding up in Sicily, where she is welcomed by the townspeople of Trapani. Lloyd observes that the Easter Week procession focuses not on Jesus but on the "powerful though sorrowful Madonna." Seeing hints of her grandmother in that portrayal, she investigates the "long-suffering nature of Italian women's lives." Musing on history and mythology, she finds links between that Madonna and Sicily's ancient fertility goddess, Demeter. Though her status as an americana brings her in contact with the Trapani men, she meets the women slowly, at a grandmother's traditional dinner and at a slumber party hosted by a young bride-to-be. She learns more from Clara, an intellectual and restaurateur, and from the women of San Biago, who organize their own Easter tradition. Back in Trapani, Lloyd joins the male-dominated procession, feeling that through her the Goddess "had rejoined the world of men." Though Lloyd writes lucidly, her story includes too little self-revelation for the reader to join her epiphany. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mercury House (January 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1562790234
• ISBN-13: 978-1562790233
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,027,386 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #93 in Books > Travel > Europe > Italy > Sicily

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars One of few books on modern Sicily, April 9, 2002

By 

Diana (TX, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: No Pictures In My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily (Paperback)

This is a very difficult book for me to review. For starters, the book is really rich and informative, and fascinating. If you're looking for a book on Sicily, then I recommend reading this one.

However, I had an INCREDIBLY hard time *reading* this book, because I found the author so utterly disagreeable and her conduct so completely reprehensible.

Opening with a letter to her dead grandmother, the book immediately launches into discourteous behaviour from males towards females, and holds fast to that theme for dear life throughout the book.

Caperna Lloyd is quite obviously a mid-life crisis conversion to Goddess worship who descends upon Sicily with her own hell-bent agenda to see proof, no matter how unlikely, that all present-day Sicilians are actually Pagan Goddess Worshippers "in the broom closet", as it were, and Catholic in name only, and this book is an attempt to prove it to the world. Almost every interaction she has with the natives either revolves around the men being misogynistic sexual predators or how the customs are, according to her, "all wrong" for these Pagans in denial (or whatever it is that she thinks they are.) Never once does she take responsibility for her own actions, such as:

o - her insistence, bordering upon demands that she be allowed to be a carrier of the floats in the annual Easter parade, which for several hundred years has been a men's ritual. She has this as a mission because it somehow proves to herself that she is better than anyone else if she succeeds in doing so...she effectively portrays her invasion to be a victory of Goddess Worship over Christianity and the patriarchy. The fact that the reasoning behind the tradition of men carrying doesn't make sense to her, or being distasteful to her should not detract from the validity and beauty of the tradition..but to Caperna Lloyd, it does

o - her complete inability to communicate effectively in English to people who only speak a language she didn't bother to learn, (in their native land, no less)

o - her arbitrarily deciding to jaunt across the island where she knows no one, to hike, in a dress and high heels, across the rocky terrain in the middle of the afternoon, leaving her with less than enough time to get back to her origination point, and also leaving her with not enough money to pay for a hotel, so she is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, of which she is unappreciative and sees an attack around every corner,

o - another jaunt across the island, determined to see Pagan Goddess Statues inside the Churches, but neglects to give herself enough time to accomplish this task and then is frustrated with the caretaker for not bending to her unannounced schedule

o - her unreasonable disdain of the keeper of the gate key to Grotta del Genovese, the cave that houses the pictures of The Goddess in The Grotto, who seeks to protect the paintings from deterioration and thus refuses to allow her to take photographs. As someone who is a professional photographer, she should realize the man is only trying to protect the artifact for future generations, but Caperna Lloyd's selfishness and mission will allow her to recognize none of that and she forces the man to allow her to take the pictures, future generations and historical reference notwithstanding.

Perhaps, however, the most telling piece of evidence in her helter-skelter, badly planned and poorly thought out adventures is the fact that when she gets back to her hotel room, after having insisted upon taking the pictures of the cave paintings, she discovers that she had no film in her camera.

Mind you....this woman is a professional photographer.

Quite frankly, her behaviour on the island, from her own telling, absolutely mortified me, and it worries me that more Americans may behave this way, making those of us that follow unwelcome.

However, if you can get past her personal agenda, feminazi politics and discourtesy, it's a good book.

3.0 out of 5 stars Beware of the End?, May 11, 2011

By 

Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: No Pictures In My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily (Paperback)

Susan Caperna Lloyd writes an interesting if not slightly ambiguous book about the search for the goddess in modern Sicily. Lloyd feels sufficiently alienated from Sicilian culture. The men treat her as objects, and for the most part she fears them. The women are sometimes objects of veneration (like the "bread" women of San Biago) but often of denigration: they are too frivolous and passive for her taste.

At the end, Lloyd is allowed to help carry a Madonna in the procession in Tripani. After being rebuffed at being given this honor (her young son is allowed) she is given the honor in a seeming afterthought. Is this the great catharsis Lloyd has with the goddess? Is this the confrontation with patriarchy?

It is hard to know what the take away is in this book.

4.0 out of 5 stars Another View of Sicilia, November 5, 2002

By 

Maddalena "la_maddalena" (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Pictures In My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily (Paperback)

This gal is really down to earth. She's also more like the typical voyager;
gets lost, makes poor decisions, finds all the hotel rooms booked.
Despite her bad luck or bad planning, she manages to get some
really good perspectives of Sicilia and meets some really nice
people. This is yet another wonderful book, that as you turn
the pages you are getting secret little glimpses of this strange
and elusive country.
She discovers it's relatively easy to meet and speak to Sicilian
men, but much harder to connect to the women, who in fact, live
differently from other Italian women.
A lot of her misconnections really did remind me of my own travels,
(what would have happened if she stayed one more day
in this town, or even just a few minutes more in that church
where the caretaker was going to show her that older statue?)

I was ready to book my own flight and follow her footsteps for
the answer!

There are just a few books on the market right now that deal with
the Black Madonnas found in Italy. In the last 100 years
most of them have disappeared or have been painted white
and the replacements are always virginal pure Marys. There
are some interesting remnants of a very different religion
in Sicilia, and Susanna managed to uncover just a little bit
of it for us.
This author discusses her attempts to find evidence of a previous and yet extant culture in a nice clear
voice rich with color and interesting personal adventures.