God's Snake by Irini Spanidou

From the Publisher

Set amid the arid landscape and stony resentments of Greece in the aftermath of its bloody civil war, this electrifying novel unfolds a series of interconnecting modern-day fables about childhood and family, love and betrayal. God's Snake is the story of the inventive, courageous Anna, a young girl who has inherited both the skepticism of classical Athens and the fierce stoicism of Sparta. It is also the story of Anna's parents: her mother, a woman as remote as she is seductive, and her father, a misogynist army officer who, when Anna cries, tells her, "We are not born to be comforted."

As Anna picks her way through this emotional minefield, she encounters people and animals that possess the revelatory powers of figures in a dream: the snakes her father's adjutant kills as emmissaries of the Devil; a poetry loving general; a haunted girl whose mother dies of tuberculosis; a frozen crow that miraculously comes back to life. God's Snake is a work filled with passion, magic, and terror, conceived by a novelist of visionary authority.

Library Journal

Anna is a Greek Army brat following her father from posting to posting throughout Greece just after the Civil War. These years of painful deprivation, spent observing her parents' cruel and loveless marriage, teach her the importance of love in adult life. Exploring emotion, especially through her extended family of aunts, uncles, and grandparents, she attempts to discover an adult role for her changing body and sense of self. Spanidou brilliantly portrays Anna's haunting experience in this remarkable first novel. Eschewing chronology for zoology, she reveals Anna through the various animals she encounters, allowing the child's innocence to touch on allegories that pass into knowledge. A prose style as spare and beautiful as the Greek countryside it describes makes this work pleasing as well as thought-provoking. -- Paul E. Hutchison, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Library Journal

Anna is a Greek Army brat following her father from posting to posting throughout Greece just after the Civil War. These years of painful deprivation, spent observing her parents' cruel and loveless marriage, teach her the importance of love in adult life. Exploring emotion, especially through her extended family of aunts, uncles, and grandparents, she attempts to discover an adult role for her changing body and sense of self. Spanidou brilliantly portrays Anna's haunting experience in this remarkable first novel. Eschewing chronology for zoology, she reveals Anna through the various animals she encounters, allowing the child's innocence to touch on allegories that pass into knowledge. A prose style as spare and beautiful as the Greek countryside it describes makes this work pleasing as well as thought-provoking. -- Paul E. Hutchison, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

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