Word: journey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...charted. To the variety of celestial landscapes in the West, Islam and Buddhism have raised their own particular paradises: the Koran details a heaven filled with beautiful, large-eyed "companions" and youths of perpetual freshness; the sutras speak of a multiplicity of "Buddha fields," pleasant way stations on the journey to Nirvana. Adding to the plenitude, the New Age is now unrolling its own versions of eternity. The best-selling author, internationally renowned medium and healer Rosemary Altea, for example, speaks of her vision: "Heaven is not a place; it's a state of awareness. Heaven is where your heart...
Islam inherited older traditions of heaven from Judaism and Christianity, including the hierarchy of angels and the seven tiers of paradise. But Muslims have a specific plan of paradise in mind, based on the stories of the Prophet's miraculous night journey to heaven. Rising into the skies on the Buraq, a fantastic creature often described as part woman, part horse, part peacock, Muhammad meets Adam, who resides in the lowest heaven, and Jesus, who is only in the fourth level. Abraham welcomes him in the seventh heaven before the Prophet is ushered into paradise for his encounter with...
...recent surge in books featuring young girls as such heroes. Consider, for example, Jostein Gaarder's erudite epic Sophie's World or Philip Pullman's Carnegie Award-winning fantasy The Golden Compass. Both of these books feature young women as the epic heroes of their own journeys of exploration and education, both were first released in Europe and both have a thing about Scandinavia and snow. Brian Hall's new coming-of-age epic, The Saskiad, has these things in common with the aforementioned books, but in all important respects it stands completely apart. Hall's book is a pleasurable...
...journey itself, while interesting, is not the most important layer of the text, but the prose--always competent but often unremarkable--becomes iridescent when we enter Saskia's dream worlds. Initially set in fantastic locales, in dusty markets heaped high with silks and sea-bound observatories straining toward the stars, the dream and outer worlds slowly move together and come to terms over the possession of Saskia's perception...
...monolithic experience and for portraying it in Saskia in a way unique to and coherent with her character. Saskia has a homoerotically charged relationship with the beautiful Jane from the first, and discovery of sexuality, both same sex and hetero-sexual, quite clearly mark stops on Saskia's journey toward finding herself. Hall even manages to write both honestly and tastefully of another such stop, masturbation...