Little Saint by Hannah Green (English) Paperback Book

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Little Saint

by Hannah Green

Ostensibly the story of one day, the 24 hours described in "Little Saint" have 20 centuries woven through them. In this exquisite book, Green provides a wondrous and lyrical portrait of a small French village, and of Saint Foy, who was martyred as a 12-year-old girl in the year 303.

FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Publisher Description

An evocative and lyrical account of one woman;s reomance with a French village and its martyr saint.

Author Biography

Hannah Green was born in Ohio, studied writing with Vladimir Nabokov and Wallace Stegner, wrote for The New Yorker, and created one memorable novel that Richard Ellmann described as possessing "the ecstasy that is fiction, is art." The reviewers' comments about that novel, The Dead of the House, have particular pertinence to the book at hand. Of Little Saint it may also be said, as The New York Times said of Hannah Green's novel, "[She] writes under the eye of eter-nity. . . . Time flows in and around the events in her book like some tune that ties all events together." As Stegner said, "This is evocation at the level of magic."

When the novel was reissued recently by Books & Company Turtle Point Press, the Times observed: "Her classic work [has] been received with almost as much critical enthusiasm as its original publication a generation ago." Again, this echoed the judgment in The Washington Post of her writing as "a kind of dream, a protracted prose poem of singular delicacy, filled with generosity, love, and wisdom."

Review

Praise for Little Saint

"The majority of novels aren't half as well written as Little Saint... At bottom and essentially, this is a book about Faith."
-- The New York Times Book Review

"Not only a record of religious experience but a rapturous hymn to the saint and her devoted villagers."
-- The New Yorker

"A miracle ... utterly endearing.... Little Saint should endure as long as the bones of Conques."
-- Chicago Tribune

"This strange and beautiful book, with its magical sentences that dance and sing right off the page into the reader's heart, seamlessly weaves the remote past into the living present more than any work I know. Learned, complex, exuberant, and deeply personal, this meditation on the millennia-long life of a French child martyr is a fitting climax to Hannah Green's devoted life of letters."
-- Alix Kates Shulman, author of Drinking the Rain

"In this glorious work, Hannah Green takes us to the ancient village of Conques, into the world of the sacred and the simple everyday. As she and her husband, Jack, are embraced by the villagers, we too feel intimately welcomed. We meet the wonderful ninety-one-and-a-half-year-old (!) Madame Benoit, the artist Kalia, and hear stories of hardship, joy, and faith, even of the mischievous streak of their beloved saint. It is one day; it is Eternity. When Hannah writes about her discovery of Sainte Foy, she writes of rapture, and this fills Little Saint with mysterious life, magnificent light."
-- Fae Myenne Ng, author of Bone

Review Quote

Praise for Little Saint "The majority of novels aren't half as well written asLittle Saint... At bottom and essentially, this is a book about Faith." --The New York Times Book Review "Not only a record of religious experience but a rapturous hymn to the saint and her devoted villagers." --The New Yorker "A miracle ... utterly endearing....Little Saintshould endure as long as the bones of Conques." --Chicago Tribune "This strange and beautiful book, with its magical sentences that dance and sing right off the page into the reader's heart, seamlessly weaves the remote past into the living present more than any work I know. Learned, complex, exuberant, and deeply personal, this meditation on the millennia-long life of a French child martyr is a fitting climax to Hannah Green's devoted life of letters." -- Alix Kates Shulman, author ofDrinking the Rain "In this glorious work, Hannah Green takes us to the ancient village of Conques, into the world of the sacred and the simple everyday. As she and her husband, Jack, are embraced by the villagers, we too feel intimately welcomed. We meet the wonderful ninety-one-and-a-half-year-old (!) Madame Benoit, the artist Kalia, and hear stories of hardship, joy, and faith, even of the mischievous streak of their beloved saint. It is one day; it is Eternity. When Hannah writes about her discovery of Sainte Foy, she writes of rapture, and this fillsLittle Saintwith mysterious life, magnificent light." -- Fae Myenne Ng, author ofBone

Excerpt from Book

CHAPTER 1 MORNING: DESCENT INTO THE TREASURE On the far side of the cloister in the long, chapel-like room called the Treasure, she sits on her throne--a small stiff gold figure robed in gold and covered with jewels and crowned with a golden diadem. Up the hill from there, Jack stands tall beside the fountain behind the little house we have rented for the summer. Here we are once again after several returns, here we are in the month of June, not yet St. John''s Day. Jack is about to mend his bicycle tire. This afternoon we arc going to Lunel. The springwater flows forth through the mouth of a mask deep in a niche in the stone embankment of the hillside and splashes into the round basin below. Sunlight quivers on the surface of the water, and dapples of watery sunshine fly like lunar moths on the stones of the niche above, and across the mottled face of the mask, which resembles the grimacing head that guards the church from the outer wall of the tribune on the north, high above the western entrance. The bells ring for eleven o''clock. Sunbrowned and strong, Jack takes the inner tube in his competent hands, good hands, and plunges it into the water. " Ah, mais il est beau! Il est fin! Il est un bon garcon! " old Madame Benoit was saying this morning, smiling her smile of infinite sweetness, her eyes as blue as the sky, her face and her hair as white as the clouds. I was in her tiny apartment in the old convent for a few minutes to pick up a book she wanted to lend me. "I am not afraid of death," she said quietly. "I have my faith." And she lifted her right hand in a gesture like a bird flying off, a gesture so perfect that I could see as she did it how her soul would fly out of the window and up, and she would go down there-- la bas --to the cemetery below the church. She waved her hand in that direction. "I have my reservation," she said with a mixture of pride and humor. Sometimes she speaks triumphantly: "I will go on the cloak of the Virgin," she says. Just now I remember to tell Jack. "Oh, Madame Benoit was saying earlier this morning, ''Oh, but he is handsome, he is fine, he is a good boy. Everyone agrees!''" Jack laughs, pleased. He will be fifty in November. But Madame Benoit is ninety-one. Ninety-one! " Quatre-vingt-onze! " " Quatre-vingt-onze et un demi ," said my friend Rosalie, correcting me, nodding her head tenderly up and down. (Not in Madame Benoit''s presence.) La Rosalie de bon matin S''en va t''au jardin Pour y culir la brioulete La belle fleur ... One fine morning Rosalie Goes out to her garden To cut the brioulete, That pretty flower So sings Madame Benoit, who sings, who sings, who has a song for every occasion, and who, ninety-one and a half, and tiny and plump and limber as a rag doll in her soft clothes, her soft shoes, goes with her cane up and down the steep streets of Conques with a swiftness and agility so remarkable that someone--I could not make out who she was talking about, but someone, another woman--had gotten very excited and somewhat angry, declaring she was on this account " Pas normale ." " Pas normale! " she repeated, echoing her friend''s anger, and laughing. The other day when Madame Benoit was walking with her cousin Madame Fabre (from whom we rent our house), out the Rue du Chateau, beyond the old Porte du Foumouze with its Romanesque fountain and, a little farther on, the lacy iron cross that rises above an ancient stone Virgin, now beheaded, there, Madame Fabre told us, Madame Benoit tripped and fell down on her knees in a mud puddle. Madame Fabre lifted her hands to her face to show us how aghast she''d been. But in that very moment, Madame Benoit turned her head and looked up. I am doing the Stations of the Cross," she said. Madame Benoit is a force . I am moved by her and drawn to her. It makes me feel warm to sit near her. Her breath smells of strawberry jam. Sometimes she says, like a litany, in her warm low voice, "Sainte Foy, holy martyr who died for Christ, Sainte Foy protects us here at Conques" and she smiles her smile of pride. And besides she has a memory that goes back further than her ninety-one years, straight back through her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother, so she can tell you, for instance, the story of the great complot of 1791 when the people of Conques saved the statue of Sainte Foy and the rest of the golden treasure from the soldiers who were coming to confiscate it. "Oh, there was a terrible storm that night," she says. "There was thunder and lightning and the rain fell in torrents, the streets turned into rushing rivers and veritable cascades. No one dared to go out . . ." The bells ring eleven a second time. It is their way. To the south, a quarter of a mile off and up in the sun-green afternoon, the wooden cross at the high outermost point of the gorge of the Ouche stands tall and thin and slightly askew against the sky. Above us bees hum in the wisteria that grows over the fence along the wall. Below us the stone roofs glint in the sunlight. Les lauzes they call these stones cut from the schist rock and laid like slates in a scalloped pattern as beautiful as shining fish scales across the steep roofs of Conques. The schist stones are blue-gray with a sheen of silver (mica) or rose-beige with gleams of gold (mica), and the dark lichens and mosses have grown over them, as they have over the craggy rocks that jut forth from the mountainsides here and rise up like castle ruins in the chasms. Cut in irregular slabs and laid on their sides and bound and covered with the pinkish mortar and stucco made from the red sand of the Dourdou, these are the stones from which the houses of Conques are built. Carrying my notebook and my pencil in my tiny deerskin Indian bag, I descend in among them, down through the roses, down the stairs that form the little street-- la ruelle --that runs past our house, and down through the narrow stone streets below. From above me, from their kitchens half-shuttered against the noon heat, come the happy voices of the Conquois finishing their lunches. The Place de l''Eglise is still empty. And it is silent except for the hoarse whistling screeches of the swallows (the dark swifts) soaring, wheeling, darting into and out from the ancient yellowed walls of the basilica; and the splashing of the Plo--the spring whose virtues were already praised in the twelfth-century Guide for the Pilgrim to Saint James of Compostela because Sainte Foy of Conques had become a major stop along the Via Podiensis, the route of Notre Dame du Puy, one of the four pilgrim routes that lead across France toward that far Finis-terre (end of the earth) to the west, beyond the Pyrenees, where, toward the end of the eighth century, the body of Saint James was discovered by the hermit Pelayo beneath an ancient shrine on a thickly wooded hill over which a great star hovered. "The Burgundians and the Teutons who go to Saint James by the Via Podiensis must go to venerate the relics of Sainte Foy, virgin and martyr," writes the author of the Guide (traditionally thought to be Aymery Picaud); and he tells us the manner of her martyr-death at Agen and that of the blessed Caprais, bishop of the town, whom she inspired. "Finally," he writes, "the very precious body of the blessed Faith, virgin and martyr, was entombed with honor in a valley called, in the common speech, Conques (Conquas), and over her sepulcher was built a beautiful basilica, where for the glory of God, even up to our own day, the Rule of Saint Benedict is observed with the greatest care; many graces are granted to those who come to venerate the relics of Sainte Foy, both to those who come in good health and to the sick; in front of the doors of the church there flows forth a most excellent source whose virtues are more admirable than anyone can say. Her fete is celebrated on the sixth of October."

Details ISBN0375757473 Author Hannah Green Short Title LITTLE ST -ML Pages 300 Series Modern Library (Paperback) Language English ISBN-10 0375757473 ISBN-13 9780375757471 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2001 Imprint Random House Inc Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Birth 1932 Residence US DOI 10.1604/9780375757471 AU Release Date 2001-07-03 NZ Release Date 2001-07-03 US Release Date 2001-07-03 UK Release Date 2001-07-03 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2001-07-03 DEWEY 270.092 Illustrations 14 B&W PHOTOS; 1 MAP Audience General

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TheNile_Item_ID:7193955;
  • Condition: Brand New
  • Format: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-13: 9780375757471
  • Author: Hannah Green
  • Book Title: Little Saint

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