Word: saskia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title suggests, The Saskiad is structured along the lines of classical epic: just as the Aeneid is about Aeneas, so is the Saskiad the story of Saskia White. Saskia, a twelve-year-old of fierce intelligence and a tendency toward literary agglomeration, lives with her ex-hippie mother and a horde of small children and quiet adults in a tumbledown former commune near Ithaca, New York. Busying herself during the day with school, the little ones and cooking duties, Saskia spends her off hours reading. The imaginary world she creates around herself is rich with the images and characters...
...Hall's solidity in maintaining and expanding Saskia's consciousness and her narrative to the reader that makes the book consistently interesting and enjoyable to read. The body of the plot takes off in the second part when Saskia receives a letter from Thomas in Denmark inviting her to come spend the summer hiking north with him. Saskia and Jane take off for the land of the Phaiakians (the name of a god-like race in the Odyssey, whom Saskia in typical fashion maps onto her father's unknown people). The rest of the novel evolves into a series...
...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...
...most evident and important allusions are to the Odyssey itself and to James Joyce's towering modern interpretation of that epic, Ulysses. It's probably not unfair to say that Hall seems to be trying to create a contemporary, child's-scale version of Ulysses. The intriguing thing about Saskia is that her adventures, while densely packed with meaning, are also straightforwardly narrated; precocious kids--like the hero herself--will be able to read her adventures without a problem...if their parents don't mind things getting a little graphic...
...kinds of love that can form a home and the lies that family members tell each other, the "salty" nature of adolescent sexuality. Hall deserves commendation for apparently realizing that emerging adolescent awareness of sexuality is not a 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...