Word: priestly
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...PRIEST FAINTED...
...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...
...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 and originality are not what one will find...
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...
Throughout The Priest Fainted, we wonder how much the narrator really learns about herself. Her sojourn is so confused that her great waking 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...