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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Virgin Novel, March 24, 2003
Plot: a young Turkish women stricken with polio wields the great gift of weaving beautiful rugs, that some feel, grant miracles to their owners. Unhappy herself, the woman finds potential happiness in a traveling anthropologist. Sound interesting? It is. At least that part is. The problem is Holly Payne. Never have I read such a terrible book with this much potential. Holly Payne has overwritten 'The Virgin's Knot' as to make it painful to read. At times, I struggled to finish. But maybe I'm being too hard. If you're the kind of reader that feels that adding the word 'incredulous' to a sentence makes it better, then you'll love this book! 'Incredulous' is used incredulously! Midway through, I begged for no more appearances of the word, but like the inevitability of the sun's rising, there it appeared every couple of pages. And the sun, I have a bone to pick with it too. In this novel, everything glistens 'in the light', or moves 'in the light', or walks 'in the light'. If you're in Holly Payne's world, you're not just tan, you're tan 'in the light'. But that's not entirely true. Sometimes your tan 'in the hard light' or 'sharp light' or 'moonlight' (for those night tannings). This dark story is told with light just about everywhere. Oh yeah... also, no one can hear for some reason. All of the characters respond to every initial bit of dialogue with the perceptive response of, "what?" A good chunk of the book consists of dialogue being repeated for these hard of hearing what-sayers. Perhaps all the 'what-ing' is supposed to infuse the dialogue with a sense of shock or amazement (in the light), while in fact, its just silly. All that said, if you read incredibly fast... so fast that you don't pay attention to any of the words... and don't mind an unfinished story with a terrible ending... then this is the book for you.
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21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great story, lousy writing., November 29, 2002
The story was just what I wanted, just what I was looking for, a story about another time, another place, another culture... a story that could take me away from my current reality and at the same time teach me about another culture. You have to love Nurdane and identify with her. The characters and the story were strong. But the writing was bad enough at times to be distracting. The total lack of quotation marks in the entire book was my first annoyance. A lousy attempt at being different that serves no
purpose at all and only confuses things horribly. Then some of the writing was just... it made me think of "overacting". Things were over-described and it made me think of
Snoopy on his doghouse w/ his typewriter typing "it was a dark and stormy night". Not everything has to be described and
compared to something else. Why can't the character just wipe the sweat from his neck? Why does he have to catch a fly
between his fingers at the same time? It makes no sense. There were many flaws and inconsistencies in the book beyond the amateurish writing style. Things such as a mention of a
transistor radio playing and then later saying that the record stopped and all you could hear was the scraping of the needle.
Well, was it a transistor radio or was it a record player? And how does one rest their their knee on their chin? Unless you are
a contortionist, it's probably the other way around. There's mention of wild board roaming the area and then later there's mention of how boars in the area went extinct many
years earlier due to polio. Well, which is it then? I also felt the book was written like the script for a tv-movie. Too many paragraphs start with the likes of; "A crack of
thunder." "The shuffle of feet." It sounds more like instructions for a sound crew than it does creative writing. Almost every scene begins with '"HE" did this' or '"SHE" did that' and you don't know WHO "he" or "she" is until you read a
few paragraphs, then you have to go back an RE-read the beginning to put the right image in your head. The story never finishes either. What happened in the end to Ayse? And all this talk on the flap about love... it's not until the very end of the book that you even begin to get a glimpse of who loves
who and why. If you can stand the writing flaws, the story is nice, although the end was such a let-down I wanted to just scream.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful world in a flawed book, May 8, 2003
Holly Payne weaves a beautiful world of mountains, sky, light, and art in the beginning of this novel about a polio-stricken young weaver. At some point about halfway through the middle of the book, after having been swept up in the language, the character of Nurdane, and the depictions of village life, I started to feel increasingly frustrated with her writing. While the character of Nurdane is beautifully realized, the other characters, especially the men, are flat, even caricature-like. Their motivations, although central to the unfolding of the plot, remain opaque at best. Secrets, deceptions, and secondary plots are hinted at then abandoned. The anthropologist on his goddess quest--unlikely in any academic setting, especially in the 1950s--appears to be included in the story mainly to provide comic relief. The most compelling element in this story is Nurdane--her faith and her strength. Her disability has apparently made her ineligible for marriage, but as a respected artist she is allowed more freedom than most unmarried women. However Payne uses language that obscures more than it illuminates, so the reader is often confused about what Nurdane is really feeling or thinking. Payne rushes into an inexplicably violent ending that destroys the mood of the book. Nurdane's actions are completely out of character, they violate her faith, her sense of self, and the complicated love she and her father share. Instead of illuminating the world of a Moslem woman in a little-known part, of the world Payne has ended up with an unevenly written book with a grim, sensationalist conclusion that would keep me from recommending it to anyone. I can't help but think that thoughtful critiques by other readers, including Moslem readers, and a thorough job of editing, might have saved this book, and let Payne express the beauty and strength of the Turkish village people and their artistic traditions as well as the restrictions faced by village women. Payne obviously means to show that patriarchal traditions are repressive for women, but she has also created a strong female character whose faith is an integral part of her. The ending obscures any kind of complexity in the relationship Nurdane has with her religion, with the men in her life, and with her own gifts.
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