Word: lizier
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...turn of the fourteenth century. The Church, disturbed by this, set up an Inquisition to seek out and remedy the heresy. Betrayed by their own priest, the villagers of Montaillou were discovered, imprisoned and questioned about their beliefs. One young woman who was deposed by the Inquisition was Grazida Lizier...
Craig was astonished by the fact that, in a village torn between the Good Men and the Catholic Church, Lizier had developed her own belief system, quite different from those of the establishment and the heretics. Lizier took pleasure in nature and her own body and found no sin in them. In the same way, through her fictional rendering of the lives of Lizier and the people of Montaillou, Craig marks an emphatic (c), neither of the above, on my Theology quiz...
...precise character development allows an intimate look at the psychology of each person. We see the village priest struggle to reconcile his vocation with his lustful desires, complicated by his secret sympathy for the Good Men. We watch as a yearning for the priest grows in both Lizier and her mother, and see the resulting resentment. We witness the struggles of the Inquisitor as he tries to remain firm in his duty to flush out heresy, even in the midst of doubts that what he is doing is right...
...only Lizier appears to be satisfied. All the others have disappointed themselves, but Lizier is unburdened by her actions. Craig seems to identify with Lizier in terms of her beliefs; in the afterword to The Good Men, she notes that her mother’s people, the Karen of Burma, have an animistic belief system which does not include the dualisms of body and soul, heaven and earth, that are so much a part of the Western tradition. It is through Lizier, then, that Craig offers her option...
...Lizier, like the Karen, makes no distinction between the holy and the physical. Sex is not sin to her, but glory. She feels that she, the birds, the water and the trees “are of life, and so, she senses, everlasting.” Craig’s stunning, engaging first novel ends with a silent suggestion made by the trees above Lizier’s head, urging her, and us, to simply “live, live, bloom...