Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Next book on the shelf is The Other Side of the Sun
Here’s what I remember about this book.
Stella North, a fresh young British woman, has married Theron Renier (who is, like, the 4th Theron Renier in a long line …) The story is told from Stella’s point of view. She’s the outsider. The book takes place – uhm – mainly in 1910. Theron works for the US government – in an incredibly secret capacity – so secret that he can’t even tell his new wife where he is going on assignment. So he sends her to stay at the Renier family house in … Savannah? Can’t remember where. She’s a newlywed, only 19 years old – but her husband has gone off to Africa on intelligent work – so she travels to America, and to … whereever … to stay at Illyria – the name of the family house. There are all of these old aunts there awaiting her – thrilled to welcome the new member of the family. They’re a bunch of characters – some are spinsters, some are not – They all immediately love Stella, because she is family … but there are dark clouds around this house. You can feel it. I know that some of it has to do with the spectre of slavery – still hovering on the sidelines in 1910. The Reniers had slaves – and many of the descendants of the slaves still live with and work for them, only as free people now. Everyone in the house has a LONG LONG memory. There’s a lot of danger, too … but what exactly is dangerous I cannot remember. Stella gets caught up in a friendship with a young black man named Ron – and the racism of the time starts to heat up – she cannot be allowed to take walks on the beach with him, and talk about mathematics (which is what they do). Forces that are larger than both of them start to press in. But … ack … there’s more to it. Can’t remember. That’ll have to be it for now.
I liked the book because it easily describes the kind of family where the ancestors are almost as real as the living. There is no demarcation line between living and dead. L’Engle really gets that, in this book.
I’ll excerpt from the very beginning, when Stella first arrives at Illyria – the childhood home of her husband – a place she has heard so much about. She has never been there, and she has never met any of his family – they got married in England.
Excerpt from The Other Side of the Sun
They were here on the veranda waiting for me when I finally reached Illyria, the four women: Honoria, tall, powerful, purply-black; the two old great-aunts, small and pale; Aunt Irene, half the age of the other three – but when one is nineteen, middle age is old. Honoria stood calmly aside as the others, twittering like birds, palm-leaf fans fluttering, rose to greet me. Aunt Irene held out her plump hands. “Stella! It is Stella, isn’t it?
“Who else would it be?” one of the old ladies whispered.
I felt the eyes of all four probing me. I was being measured, judged. I smiled brightly to hide my discomfort.
“Stella, honey, welcome to Illyria. I am your Aunt Irene.” She drew me to her. Her voice was bright-pink crushed velvet and she smelled of heliotrope. She called herself “Ant Ah-reen” and, probably because I was so keyed up, I almost giggled.
“And this is your Great-aunt Mary Desborough, and your Great-aunt Olivia.”
The two old ladies moved forward. Unlike Aunt Irene, who looked like a fashion plate, they were dressed in rusty and old-fashioned clothes, with their hair parted in the middle, and their ears poking out in the fashion (I learned later) which had been popular during “The War”. “Welcome, child,” one of them pecked me on the cheek. “We welcome the new Mrs. Theron Renier. I am Aunt Mary Desborough.”
“And I’m Aunt Olivia,” the other old lady said, and reached to kiss me. She smelled lightly of lemon and lavendar; the old-grey watered silk of her dress rustled as she moved, and her voice was like it, a dry, gentle rustling.
“Clive! Clive! Ronnie!” Aunt Irene called. “Oh, there you are. Please see that Miss Stella’s things are taken to her room so that Honoria can unpack them.”
The old colored woman moved to me; there was something majestic about her; she took my hands in her very strong ones and looked into my face. I felt like a child instead of a married woman. “We welcome you, Miss Stella.”
This, then, was Honoria. I knew that Honoria was important. Immediately after Mado’s death it was Honoria who saw to it that her ring came to my Terry for his bride.
The Renier ring. Touching that ring got me through a lot of bad times. Not that I thought it had any magical properties, although I was to find that many people did indeed believe this. It was just that the ring always made me know who I was: Mrs. Theron Renier. I touched it now, a heavy ring, made of two beautifully etched gold serpents, entwined like those on a caduceus, with rubies for eyes.
“It came to Mado from Honoria,” Terry had told me when he first showed it to me the night he asked me to be his wife.
“Mado –”
“My grandmother. Marguerite Dominique de la Valeur Renier. She was always called Mado.”
“And Honoria?”
He hesitated. “I suppose you might call her Mado’s housekeeper. I love her almost as much as I loved Mado. Maybe as much because they belonged together.”
My husband, of all the Renier men, was the one who was most full of laughter, but when he took the ring out of its velvet box to give it to me, he was totally serious. “It carries a responsibility,” he said, “a responsibility of healing. The serpent isn’t always a symbol of evil. You remember that the twined serpent is the doctor’s emblem, and my Grandfather Theron was a doctor.”
(Doctor Theron, his young son,
There met Mado, loved and won,
But lost the War Between the States …)
I looked at the ring, fingering the rubies. “How would a housekeeper get a ring like this?”
“Honoria was born in Africa,” Terry had said, as though that explained everything.
My husband is disturbed constantly with a ring in ears, whether it is possible as that to correct? Speak it because of a high blood pressure? WBR LeoP