Word: davidson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Priest Fainted, Catherine Temma Davidson's first novel, is another one of those lovely stories dealing with women who travel to distant lands trying to escape their mothers, only to discover--surprise!--that their lives are more similar to their mother's than they thought. Davidson also attempts to weave cooking, Greek mythology and sexual awakening into her alinear story, which ultimately tumbles like the Tower of Babel under its heavy pedanticness. Davidson, a poet, should not quit her day job. Although the language of The Priest Fainted is eloquent enough, the alinearity simply gets tire-some...
...main problems with this novel lie in the fact that Davidson does not know how to engage a reader. While Like Water For Chocolate, a book which Davidson has heavily imitated with her food-as-culture-and-identity-and-feminism theme, had charm and humor, as well as a concrete plot, the plot of The Priest Fainted can be summed up in one sentence: 19 year-old Greek-American girl travels to Greece, makes some friends, has adventurous sex and realizes why her mother decided not to marry a Greek man (because like all men, they, too, are pigs). Coherence...
...Davidson opens up the novel with women cooking the sensual, traditional Greek dish Iman Baildi, which in English means "the priest fainted," hence the title of this book. Although this sounds like a delicious food, its significance in the novel is never fully developed. In fact, the food genre is quickly dropped, which can confuse a reader who thought this novel would be about taking a culinary journey into Greece and getting some heart-to-heart searching along the way. Instead, the novel delves superficially into many "modern" themes and experiences, and the plot line--already thinner than a slice...
...moment seems to be when she ends her relationship with the Greek basketball player, who had been verbally and physically abusing her. Why she needed a trip to Greece and over a hundred pages to learn to stay away from abusive men is beyond the comprehension of most readers. Davidson herself seems to know that the narrator's soul-searching is not quite so deep, as when the narrator speaks about "the rubble of my year in Greece...
...with her daughter. The best part of the book is when the narrator's mother and her best friend meet again after over thirty years, and are afraid to face each other because they do not want to part with the past, when they were young, beautiful and hopeful. Davidson's descriptions of the mother are well-crafted and sad without being overly cheesy or moralistic. The mother is "like a ghost come to life," when she arrives in Greece, and the narrator thinks "she [the mother] looks beautiful, as always. I have just begun to understand how a secret...