MORTAL LOVE

By Elizabeth Hand

Paperback, 384 pages
Published June 28th 2005 by Harper Paperbacks (first published 2004)
ISBN 0060755342 (ISBN13: 9780060755348)

 

Within her is the world. A time there was when Venoraxia was lost to us with all our hope. A girl seen as an elder flower. You make her owls when she wants to be flowers.

This marvelous read is from one of National Bookstore's crazy sale last April of this year. The book was marked down more than  ten times its original price, imagine from 585Php or 13.60USD to only 50Php or 1.62USD. I must admit that this played  a major factor why I bought it too.

As a Fine Arts major, I was easily captivated with its cover of  a woman in a Renaissance inspired oil paint effect. Set on a magnificently romantic Victorian era, is an interesting love affair of a young and struggling painter and his muse.

It won my interest in and I enjoyed the way Elizabeth Hand narrated and depicted the paints, the art materials and the process of painting in an incredibly  "matter of fact "tone. Through this, it was almost effortless to imagine how each scene should seem to be. It was a unquestionably a page turner as the characters of the period painter Radborne Comstock and the modern day writer, Daniel Rowlands was unbelievably exciting.

I was both intrigued and mystified how Evienne Upstone was to Larkin Meade, and Radborne Comstock was to Daniel Rowlands connected despite  more than a hundred years of time difference. I easily fell in love with the book and with the ways the narrative was as well as details.

Unfortunately, that ended all too soon as I figured I was down to its last thirty pages and I still don't understand most parts of it. The plot became so complicated that it was impossible to end it in a matter of few pages.  Actually, the plot created a plot out of the plot of another plot. I knew I wasn't going to like how it's going to end and I was right. Larkin ended up with Comstock's manic depressive descendant and for whatsoever reason it began an abrupt reroute on a portal of something. This is where I totally got lost.

The desire for something hopeless, for what is already gone, for what can never be yours.