Customer Reviews

Poison

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This 1996 novel by Kathryn Harrison is a work of pure artistry. The reader is plunged into 17th century Spain and hurled into the contrasting lives of Francisca, the daughter of a poor Spanish silk grower, and Marie Louise de Bourbon, the young and tragic Queen of Spain.

The words are pure poetry and filled with fascinating historical details: silk worms and exotic poisons, court life and the dungeons of the Inquisition, wet-nurses and dwarfs, religion and politics. It's all there.

The world she describes made me squirm. Pulled me into the story, and kept me turning the pages.

Against this background, and with exquisite detail, the reader is thrust into the lives of these two women. Our hearts race with forbidden passion and we shudder with fear of the Inquisition carts. We visit the royal bedchamber as well as the torturer's rack.

There's love in this book, and lots of sadness. There are lessons to learn and metaphors for life. People to care about. Sin, deception, betrayal. And, when the book is over, there is the feeling of having lived for a short while through the terror and turmoil that defined 17th century Spain.

This book is not for the squeamish. Or for those who are looking for a light pleasant read. But for those who are willing to experience the harshness of the world it describes, this is a really fine book.

The language Kathryn Harrison uses to tell this story is exquisite. Reading this novel was like running your fingers over a fine brocade; the novel has a rich texture and an intriguing plot. I love the way Harrison approaches the questions of religion and heresy, making these themes of the novel particularly important by placing her narrative in the time frame of the Spanish Inquisition. I have to take issue with those who dismiss this novel as a glorified romance novel. There's a lot more to Francisca and Alvaro's relationship than sex, and the juxtaposition of the situations of the two women highlights this difference.

This was the first Kathryn Harrison novel I ever read, and it made Harrison one of my favorite writers, deservedly so. This novel will remain one of my top ten all-time favorite books, mainly because of Harrison's gorgeous prose.

I fell in love with this book, with the darkness, with the hopeless love...*spoilers* I felt her love of Alvaro - I felt her need to have him..it felt real to me..but I did not enjoy what happened to her child and her journey to find a miracle - it was very depressing and her description of that time was unbearable -but I think this fact alone proves that Kathryn Harrison is a great author, she had the talent to destroy me with one sentence...even when describing the queens sickness - i too felt ill - I had to put the book down..!! I did wish however, that she would gain some type of vengeance against her sister, or at least the queen would be blessed with the knowledge that her killer did not go unpunished. there was NO happiness in this book, even the happy thoughts were clouded with the despair up ahead. I loved this book because it stayed with me even after I put it down. I still to this day remember how she described her love for her child.
phew..it is exhausting to think about.

Harrison's novel of the Spanish Inquisition is a visionary, mystical drama narrated by a victim of the Inquisition, Francisca de Luarca, daughter of a silk farmer and his unfortunately fecund wife, Concepcion.

Right at the beginning Harrison takes a risk, letting the reader know her narrator is, at 28, languishing between tortures in the dungeons, her father ruined, her mother a previous victim of the madness of the times, her lover dead. And in the palace above her lies a woman born on the same day as Francisca, Maria Luisa, Queen of Spain, dying of poison.

With this ending in store, why read further? But among Harrison's gifts is that of arousing curiosity. From the first page, the reader wants to know how every event came to pass. Francisca's father, a dreamer like his daughter, burns his mulberry trees and plants a new improved strain which the worms will not eat.

"From this time forward, with my grandfather dead and Papa ruined, the fortunes of the Luarca family would be left to the ingenuity of its women. Hardly a bad thing, on the face of it, as Luarca women lacked for neither talent nor tenacity. In fact, my mother was soon discovered to possess a rare gift, and it was this gift which provided her passport to the palace. It was this gift that would save us for a time, before it also brought destruction."

With each small leap into a more terrible future, Harrison spins a strong cord binding her reader deeper into the story. The narrative is Francisca's but from the beginning her life runs in tandem with that of Spain's future queen, Marie Louise de Bourbon, niece of Louis XIV, a girl who couldn't be more different from Francisca and whose life actually crosses hers only twice.

Francisca's dreams turn to ashes as they come to pass. Marie Louise, too carefree to dream, is plunged into a painful reality as soon as she crosses the border from France to Spain. It seems entirely natural, in Harrison's hands, that Francisca should reveal the new queen's most intimate thoughts and emotions as her horror grows, yoked to a grotesque and impotent man. For dreams, Maria Luisa (as she now is) must turn to opium.

As the queen, a faithful wife, is more and more reviled for childlessness, Francisca embraces a grand forbidden passion with her priest. The two women's stories unfold alternately in rich, vivid prose steeped in Francisca's magic realism and the morbid superstition that ruled Spain.

The Inquisition is everywhere. With cart horses' hooves muffled to deaden the noise of the Inquisitor's night arrival, neighbors disappear. Only their empty shoes left by the door reveal their fate. Anything - a sick child, a dead calf - or nothing at all, may attract the attention of the Inquisitor. Witches abound and in the palace a whole wing is given over to strange creatures who may foretell the future with their bleeding feet or divine secrets with a touch of their hands.

These are turbulent, fearful times when the freakish is either fashionable or cursed and good fortune may be a sign of sorcery. Horrible tortures exalt God and purify the souls of witches. Self-mortification is glorified.

Harrison's earthy, luminous and intimate prose brings these turbulent dark days into the mind of the reader where it lingers long after the passions of Francisca have been stilled and the husk of the queen has been shattered to release her trapped soul.

Poison is written in lyrically beautiful prose that weaves a hypnotic spell around the plot. Kathryn Harrison is a master with words and recreates seventeenth century France and Spain in a marvelous fashion. The interweaving of the two plots and the parallels in the lives of the French and Spanish women are done with a storyteller's ultimate skill. Poison is rich with themes of lust and spirituality, redemption and betrayal, sin and forgiveness. This is a beautiful, but darkly haunting novel that won't be forgotten.

Kathryn Harrison's lush and dark prose chronicles the dual tale of a doomed queen and a poor peasant girl, both victims of the Spanish Inquisition. THe book's descriptions of life in SPain during the INquisition seems well researched and the writing is compelling enough to keep you reading. THe many bodily fluids emitted by the characters, sperm, blood, milk, sweat, vomit, etc. would seem to be a metaphor for the cultural and spiritual "poison" of the times. However, most readers are likely to latch on to one character or the other as being more interesting.Both lives, those of the queen, Maria Luisa, and that of the peasant girl, FRancesca, are told by Francesca, but her obvious distance from the Queen's life does not allow her to carry it off. We know little of her thoughts and desires, she is thus denied any real dignity or persona. Harrison might have done better to let each tell their own story and then have them merge in some significant way, but each story never does intersect. Harrison is a master prose stylist, but the story is not quite able to carry the book. It actually could have been longer and given us more detail about the INquisition itself, which remains everpresent i nthe story, but always behind the scenes and hidden from view. Balancing life in the castle with life in the fields proves too difficult a task in this short a book (310 pages). Furthermore, the dual structure of rich and poor is further confused by the author's seeming desire to write both a darkly atmospheric setpiece of the era and a tribute to the power of love, Harlequin style. THe prose is rich enough, but the lines of the story are so obvious that the book, in the end, offers few surprises; we are not at all shocked by the sad ending to the story. A book for admirers of style over substance, or for historians of the era, but not recommended for the casual reader.

Kathryn Harrison has done a beautiful job in capturing the essence of the spirit of the times in the lyrically beautiful prose of Poison. She is a word weaver, a poet as much as a novelist, and indeed, Poison reads much like a gorgeous poem I never wanted to end. The way Harrison weaves the two stories together is nothing short of magic. Poison is, indeed, a novel that will capture both the imagination and the heart.

I began to read this book and was immedately spellbound. The author had me clinging to her every masterfully written word and at the same time I was wincing in empathy to the misery of her heroines and their dark nightmarish world of the inquisition, of poverty, disease, madness and fear. Unlike many other books about such dark and hopeless situations, it is not a depressing book. Rather, it is the determination of the heroines to survive and to live life as fully as possible in spite of the risks that leave me haunted by this book, even today, six months after reading it.

This was a wonderful book. Rich and poetic. Ms. Harris made me feel as if I were in the novel itself. A must read.

I had high hopes for this book... especially after reading a lot of positive reviews. I generally like books about women from different periods of time (Crimson Petal and the White, the Dress Lodger, Slammerkin). However, I found this book tedious. In the future, whenever I hear a lot of people talking about the "beautiful, poetic language" - i'm taking it for what it is. Flowery, and sometimes over-descriptive account of the story. This book had the makings of a lot going for it - 2 women's lives parralled in tenuous situations but it fell flat for me and I think it was partly because of the language and partly because I could not get into the characters as much as I wanted to. I don't want to read about a person's dreams more than what is really happening in the story. I like stories that are more straight-forward and unflinching.