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The Witch Trinity A Novel Erika Mailman 9780307351524 Books

Download As PDF : The Witch Trinity A Novel Erika Mailman 9780307351524 Books

The Witch Trinity A Novel Erika Mailman 9780307351524 Books

For anyone looking for scary reading this Halloween season, I strongly recommend The Witch's Trinity by Erika Mailman. It's a fictional case-study of the European witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as told in the first person by an old grandmother in a medieval German village who, herself, becomes accused after witnessing the torture and burning of her lifelong best friend. I'm VERY selective about my fiction, so when I recommend a story, know that it's damn good! I love the way this author writes---profound throughout and poetic with an economy of prose. The story effectively portrays the times---a superstitious medieval Europe still reeling from the plague, with starving peasants and ecclesiastical abuse, while not being tediously descriptive(as so many authors make the mistake of doing). Mailman masterfully conveys the daunting atmosphere of her world and the heavy hand of the medieval Church(what could be scarier?). And she writes with such compassion that even the brutalities are manageable for the squeamish.
Even though the story's time period technically falls within the Renaissance, I tend to regard such distinctions as largely artificial, as the everyday people---and especially the Church---were still very medieval.
Here's an excerpt:
"I walked to the fire to look one last time at what remained of my dearest friend on earth. The fine rigging of her fingers still clenched at the coals, and the longer shards connected them with the rods that I thought where her shoulders, or her ribs, a confusing jumble. A broad expanse of white was her pate, buried facedown in the ashes. I was glad not to be able to see the hollows of her eyes and the strangeness that a nose becomes: I had seen a few skulls in my lifetime and did not like the face that lies under our living faces."
Enjoy and Happy Halloween!


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The Witch Trinity A Novel Erika Mailman 9780307351524 Books Reviews

Erika Mailman’s The Witch’s Trinity is a haunting tale set in Germany during the witchcraft trials. Times are hard and the village people are starving. When a friar from the big city arrives and claims the town has been cursed by witches, Gude Muller, a village elder who is suffering from old age, forgetfulness, and hallucinations, fears she will be accused. After her son leaves on a hunting expedition, she is left alone with her conniving, desperate stepdaughter and frightened villagers eager to rout out the offending witch. Gude's peril increases when her friend is accused and imprisoned, and she must rely on her own resources to save herself. I loved this book and highly recommend it.
This book stayed with me long after I read it.

The story was riveting and scary, it opened my eyes to a world of unjust in a just society. Many times I found myself not being able to believe some of the actions that took place, only to remind myself that indeed, these things happened.

The women in this story had depth , they were relatable and showed many of the characteristics that woman past & present face everyday.
I really appreciate how the unreliable narrator was handled. Gune's memories of the past are so vivid while her perceptions of the present are quite jumbled, but not so jumbled that the reader has trouble keeping track of what's going on. It's an easy read (not emotionally that is, but in terms of how it's structured and how the words are put together) and doesn't get bogged down in the research.

That said, I think I would have liked more specificity on how the witch trial played out. Much of the action hinged on very straightforward motives that are easily understandable to a modern reader- hunger, envy, greed, etc. It didn't spend much time on the things that are a bit more alien to modern readers- superstition, the level of religiosity, conflict between different religious beliefs and practices. Most of this is touched on, but it's never explored fully.
This novel explores the horrific and tragic lengths of human desperation and the evils of mob mentality. As the character's human bonds are tested by the hardships of famine, traditional ways conflict with the authority of official religion; survival becomes ultimate. As many plots that center on witch hunts, scapegoating is the central driving force of this narrative and makes the story predictable in some ways. However, Mailman constructed a sturdy narrative that interweave religious believes in the diabolical (as well as redemptive destruction of evil) with an unreliable narrator, and therefore makes both the character motivations more complex and reality of narrative of compelling interest to the plot. Furthermore, Mailman plays devil's advocate with the ways that individual interest can subvert intention and backfire. In this novel, characters succeed best when they weigh lives equally.
The author's inspiration for the novel is revealed in the concluding note to be her own familial connections to witch trails in colonial New England. For a novel published in 2007, I was disappointed that author's historical sources used to assert current theories on the motivations for witch hysteria were rather dated (over twenty years old). More recent scholarship, has indeed poked holes in the works that Mailman used to discuss her inspiration narrative, such as the ergot theory. This, however, has no significant bearing on the novel itself, which stands on its own merits and is set in an entirely different place and time -- in fact, making the historical essay at the end of the novel somewhat out of context. While the historical essay serves to put a personal story and make an individual connection to the experience of witchcraft accusations, Mailman's novel is set one hundred years before the historical note, in an entirely different culture and country. While this might speak to a universal human aspect of "witch hunting" behavior - which Mailman seems to be trying to link to to scapegoating those outside the norms of society - one should, perhaps, be cautious of overly equating one phenomenon with another, historically speaking. The historical deviation and dated source work, made me question the contextual research for the novel's setting. I, therefore, decided to take the novel as an imaginary work inspired by historical themes, and not historical fiction, properly based in a specific historical context.
To return to the novel itself, the narrative tensions were well-crafted and strong throughout most of the novel. I, furthermore, appreciated reading a novel from the perspective of an elderly woman, which is a less common plot devise. However, I found aspects of the ending contrived and chronologically unrealistic, (especially the tower). Unless the reader is to question the veracity of the concluding account, given the narrator's questionable reliability -- and I did not take it that we were in this instance -- the ending softened the impact novel for me, personally. Despite, its flaws, this was a worthwhile read that tapped into questions of self-preservation, compassion, and reality.
For anyone looking for scary reading this Halloween season, I strongly recommend The Witch's Trinity by Erika Mailman. It's a fictional case-study of the European witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as told in the first person by an old grandmother in a medieval German village who, herself, becomes accused after witnessing the torture and burning of her lifelong best friend. I'm VERY selective about my fiction, so when I recommend a story, know that it's damn good! I love the way this author writes---profound throughout and poetic with an economy of prose. The story effectively portrays the times---a superstitious medieval Europe still reeling from the plague, with starving peasants and ecclesiastical abuse, while not being tediously descriptive(as so many authors make the mistake of doing). Mailman masterfully conveys the daunting atmosphere of her world and the heavy hand of the medieval Church(what could be scarier?). And she writes with such compassion that even the brutalities are manageable for the squeamish.
Even though the story's time period technically falls within the Renaissance, I tend to regard such distinctions as largely artificial, as the everyday people---and especially the Church---were still very medieval.
Here's an excerpt
"I walked to the fire to look one last time at what remained of my dearest friend on earth. The fine rigging of her fingers still clenched at the coals, and the longer shards connected them with the rods that I thought where her shoulders, or her ribs, a confusing jumble. A broad expanse of white was her pate, buried facedown in the ashes. I was glad not to be able to see the hollows of her eyes and the strangeness that a nose becomes I had seen a few skulls in my lifetime and did not like the face that lies under our living faces."
Enjoy and Happy Halloween!