The Priest Fainted
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 uses 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.
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.