Rapunzel, MD

Sold for Endless Rue, by Madeleine E. Robins, is an adaptation loosely based on Rapunzel, though I didn't even realize that until near the very end when the Rapunzel character chopped off her hair.  It is set in Medieval Italy and focuses on a female line of healers and physicians.  The second in that line, Laura, is an orphan adopted by a kind and confident healer.  Laura is very intelligent and goes on to become a physician in the city.  Her adopted daughter Bieta also wants to be a physician but struggles a lot with her studies and falls in love with a fisherman.  This angers her mother, who wants her to study only.  The fisherman is not acceptable.  Thus, Bieta's life becomes more and more limited, and then there is mention of her long hair, and that is when I realized that Bieta was actually Rapunzel and Laura was the villain.

I really love Robins' Sarah Tolerance series, set in an alternate history Regency England with an awesome fallen woman private investigator.  However, I have not enjoyed any of her other books nearly as much.  Sold for Endless Rue was fairly disappointing as well.

What I did like was the detail about medicine in 13th century Europe, and Robins making clear that women, whether as midwives, rural healers, or highly respected physicians, had a very strong and respected role in healing.  I also enjoyed reading more about the rigorous training required to be a physician in the 13th century, though there is of course the irony that the physicians spent a lot of time learning things that, I assume, did not make them much better at all than their rural healer counterparts who did not need to understand algebra and astrology to help their patients.  I do think that Robins is quite skilled at showing how women in history expanded their worlds, proving that our narrow way of assuming that all women ran homes and nothing else is false.  And even if it's mostly true, women did do a lot that we don't give them credit for.

A 13th century travel guide to wondrous places

I purchased the book Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, after hearing one of the author's short stories on an episode of Radiolab.  I was completely mesmerized by the story and wanted immediately to read more by the author.  I chose Invisible Cities because the premise just seemed so fascinating.  It's based on imagined conversations between famed explorer Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan.  Each section begins and ends with bits of conversation between the two men and each short chapter is Marco Polo's description of a different, fantastical city that he has visited within Kublai Khan's realm.

I should say right from the start that there is no plot in this book.  This was a surprise to me and I was on uneven footing through the first few chapters, unsure of whether I was reading the book correctly or if I had missed something major, or what happened.  It also isn't a book with great characters.  While Marco Polo and Kublai Khan to us are larger than life and would be expected to dominate the narrative, they do not.  You learn about them in subtle ways, through their conversations and their descriptions of cities, but you do not know them any better than they want you to know them and they are not the stars of this collection.

This short book, more than anything else, is about the power that words have to evoke a setting, utterly and completely.  The cities that Marco Polo describes do not exist, but gosh, you wish they did.  This is where Calvino's genius for description, for using just the right word to get across exactly what he wants the reader to take away, really comes through.  I wish I could read Italian because I can't help feeling that something must have been lost in translation.  This is not because I read a bad translation - I didn't, the language was beautiful - but because I feel like each word was chosen with such care that I would like to read the book in Calvino's chosen language.  In a way, I felt like each chapter was a poem.  They were all so short - between two and three pages long - and they evoked such a sense of nostalgia for places that do not even exist, and with such a succinct use of words - that they felt very poem-like to me.

I read this book while traveling, which I think was ideal.  As you walk around unfamiliar places, I think you notice things that the locals ignore or don't think about any more, and you are very aware of how the city feels and what its personality is.  Calvino takes that feeling to an extreme by making his cities as magical as possible so that you have a sense not just of the physical attributes of the city, but the more nebulous aspects, too - the atmosphere and vibe that are so hard to describe to other people.

And each chapter is such a delight.  I don't want to ruin the experience of reading something so different for you, but I do want you to get a sense of what is waiting for you.  There's one city that exists on a spiderweb.  One that is built in men's dreams of chasing a woman.  One that has only the plumbing but none of the buildings.  One that is built entirely on massive stilts.  So many inventive and creative places to visit!

I admit this book wasn't what I was expecting.  I really wanted to read a novel by Calvino and this is certainly not a novel.  I was disappointed at the lack of characters and plot and context.  But I can still get a novel by Calvino and enjoy that.  This was a different, completely new, kind of treat, and I think if you go into the book knowing that it really is just a series of vignettes that describe cities you wish truly were in our world, then you would really enjoy it.  The language is beautiful, and the cities - I wish there were accompanying illustrations for each chapter!