The Priest Fainted: A Novel [Hardcover]

Catherine T. Davidson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1998

A stunning debut about a young Greek-American woman and the history she shares with her mother and grandmother.

Imam is a recipe known throughout villages in Greece, handed down from mother to daughter. If you come from these villages, your history is passed on through your body.

Its full name is imam baildi, and it means the priest fainted. Perhaps the priest was given a bit of bitter and sweet pleasure, and the power of everything behind the dish pushed him off his rock, just for a moment. Perhaps, when he was tumbling through the air, sighing with fear and ecstasy, he saw a glimpse of a new life to come.

Layered with love affairs, family squabbles, poignant misunderstandings, moments of wonder, and more, The Priest Fainted is nothing less than the recipe for a young Greek-American woman's life. Using her imagination and the stories passed through her bones as ingredients, Catherine Temma Davidson bls memories, Greek myths, recipes, and family gossip to uncover a hidden history, which is the story of one woman's year in Greece as it crosses and doubles back over the lives of her mother and grandmother.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Catherine Temma Davidson's roots as a poet are immediately apparent in the lyrical prose style she adopts for her first novel, The Priest Fainted. Describing the lives of young girls in Greece, where the unnamed narrator has come for a year, Davidson writes: "Girls helping their mothers to prepare simple meals acquire an unspoken knowledge in their palms and fingers. If you come from these villages, you must find your history in your body." Larissa, the Greek village she visits, "sweats in the plains, dusty and sedentary. Like a promise, the peaks rise in the distance, garlanded in gorges and wild onions, goats and streams." This closely autobiographical novel follows the fortunes of a 21-year-old Greek-American woman as she returns to the land of her foremothers and reimagines their lives and her own in terms of classic Greek myths. Food, (the book's title is the name of a popular eggplant dish), mythology, religion, and feminism are just a few of the themes Davidson's heroine touches on in the course of her year in Greece as she caroms between the personal (her Greek relatives, an affair with a Greek-American basketball player) and the political: the circumscribed lives of women down through the years. By the end of the book, the narrator has realized that no individual life story exists in a vacuum; in order to understand ourselves, we must understand those who came before.

From Publishers Weekly

Imam baildi, a Greek dish whose name translates to "the priest fainted," is a delicacy both bitter and sweet?like this meditative debut from poet Davidson (Inheriting the Ocean) about a young Greek-American woman's journey to her ancestors' homeland. Framed by Greek myths (which open each chapter) and interwoven with tales of her mother's visit 30 years earlier, the story concerns the odyssey of an unnamed, 19-year-old narrator who travels to Athens and the small town of Larissa, unwittingly following in the footsteps of the mother she is trying, for the moment, to escape. Her own lively expatriate experiences?which include an obsession with a promiscuous Greek basketball player, a friendship with an impetuous American model, an Athenian newspaper job and a firsthand understanding of the conservative ethos surrounding Greek women?show the difficulty of being at once of a culture and foreign to it. As she slowly discovers more about her mother's life-altering decision not to marry a Greek man, she realizes that not all family resemblances are on the surface. Davidson's reworking of the myths sometimes feels familiar (yet another unremarkable interpretation of the Orpheus and Eurydice story) and she has a tendency to poeticize that detracts from the narrative's authentic charge. Nevertheless, her voice is agile and intelligent, and the novel ultimately proves to be a surprisingly resonant melange of wisdom and humor, a testimony to the strong bonds of family and cultural traditions.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (March 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805055398
• ISBN-13: 978-0805055399
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,675,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable achievement, November 25, 1999

By 

Alekos (Cancun, Quintana Roo Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Priest Fainted: A Novel (Paperback)

The theme of this superb novel is change. Change that happens in people and places when people are uprooted, for whatever reason, from places their forebears have loved for centuries. The book's persona spends time in Greece trying to understand the truth of her relationship with her mother and grandmother. In that sense it is a piece of fiction for women, but it also offers plenty about relations among humans in general. By far the most interesting and likeable personage is the over-achieving mother, who actually got a lift uptown from Eleanor Roosevelt. There is lots of sex in this work, all of it honest, none of it forced. The protagonist falls into a manipulative relationship with a gorgeous athlete whose sense of basic humanity is second-rate and of course she suffers. But that's a kind of trade-off because at the same time she is learning things and resolving issues with regard to members of her family, both Greek and American. There is a happy array of flamboyant minor characters here, each with his or her own special character flaw and particular fear or maladjustment. I suspect the author had as good a time writing this book as I did reading it. She comes off as a joyful person. The book is structured by seemingly mythic stories that move the narrative along and at the same time tie us back to what it means to be Greek and Greek American, even though thorough enjoyment of Davidson's book does not depend on any Greek connection.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars davidson takes her place alongside Tan, Naylor, Silko, June 30, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Elon College, North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Priest Fainted: A Novel (Hardcover)

Davidson's first novel is a smooth and poetic story intertwining Greek myths with the story of the female side of the protagonist's family. Much like Leslie Silko does in her novel "Ceremony," Davidson uses ancient myths to help explain the present, making these myths seem relevant and alive, as well as infusing the present with the weight of the past. Although the novel does not center on mother/daughter conflict as much as Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club," Davidson's story highlights the unspoken spiritual bond that unites mothers and daughters, much like Tan did in her celebrated novel. Having lived in Greece myself and being married to a native Greek woman, I can say that her rendering of this beautiful but hard-to-explain country is accurate. My only point of contention is with the protagonist's ongoing relationship with a clearly abusive man. Other reviewers have pointed out the realism of the story, but this male reader was just looking for some kind of explanation as to why she stayed in this unhealthy situation for so long. Still, I recommend this book to anyone who would like a glimpse into Greek/Greek-American culture.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars bubbling mixture of ancient and modern Greece, October 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Priest Fainted: A Novel (Paperback)

A convoluted patchwork novel that entrances the reader with it's poetic narrative. Threads of ancient and modern Greece run silver and gold in this book, complementing each other. The stories of generations of Greek women run together in a spiral circle that leads the reader along. A satisfying and dreamy read.