| Title | : | Through a Brazen Mirror |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1885865244 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781885865243 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 100 |
| Publication | : | First published December 1, 1988 |
Through a Brazen Mirror Reviews
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"¡Ay, qué negros odios a su madre impelieron,
a enviar ladrones en mitad de la noche,
que sin piedad a asaltar y asesinar acudieron,
y cometido el crimen, su camino prosiguieron.
¿No os creeréis que le dolía el corazón
al reposar en la tierra sus rubios cabellos,
no os creeréis que lloraba su corazón
al dar la vuelta y despedirse de su amor?
(...)" (p. 162).
Conocer nuevos autores es siempre una experiencia maravillosa. Sin embargo, cada cierto tiempo, si tenemos suerte, nos encontramos con autores que, aunque desconocidos, te hacen sentir una especie de llamado; una voz instintiva que te indica que podría convertirse en uno de tus favoritos.
Bueno, eso fue lo que sentí al haber descubierto a Delia Sherman en la librería, y después de haber leído El Espejo de Bronce, me alegra muchísimo poder confirmar que, una vez más, mi instinto me ha llevado por el camino correcto.
El reino medieval de Albia es el escenario de una historia que sigue las andanzas de tres personajes:
La de Margaret, hechicera de la Torre de Piedra, quien luego de haber vislumbrado su fatal destino por medio de un mágico Espejo de Bronce, decide dedicar toda la magnitud de su poder al tormento de su hija, dada en adopción al nacer.
La de William, un joven herido y misterioso que tras haber conseguido un lugar en el castillo de Albia, logra alcanzar el puesto de chambelán del Rey, debido a su ingenio y sus habilidades como herborista, pero cuyo aparente desinterés hacia el sexo femenino empieza a despertar rumores indeseados entre los miembros de la corte.
Y la del Rey Lionel de Albia, quien tras haber llevado a cabo una invasión fallida a un reino vecino, trata de recomponer su imagen y su corazón al haber perdido a su más querido amigo en dicha batalla. Una pérdida que llevará a otros miembros de la corte a cuestionarse qué tipo de relación tenía el rey con su amigo, así como con ese nuevo chambelán en quien confía muy sospechosamente.
Escrita a modo de epopeya medieval, ésta es una historia que trata temas como la desesperación, la venganza, el anhelo de poder, y el amor no correspondido, a la vez que cuestiona constantemente el rol de las mujeres establecido por la sociedad patriarcal de la época. El relato de Sherman me pareció fascinante de principio a fin, y su narración en distintos tiempos me pareció fundamental para mantener la tensión y el suspenso alrededor de los tres personajes principales.
Si les gustan los relatos medievales, muy al estilo de Chretien de Troyes o los relatos artúricos, definitivamente les recomiendo esta novela. La traducción de Manuel de los Reyes es preciosa, además. -
As a portrait of Medieval English life, both noble and peasant, this is lovely. As a novel . . . it doesn't really work. It's based on a ballad and follows a ballad's fairy-tale logic, which means the characters' actions have virtually no effect on anything that occurs. That's driven by Fate.
Which is a shame, because I think, if I'd spent more time with them in a more naturalistic setting, I would have quite liked the characters. My favorite bits were the glimpses of Bet's home life, the castle kitchen, and "William's" attempts to put the order of the castle to rights. I wanted more of that, and fewer ghosts and demons--and, most of all, I wanted to see inside "William's" head and understand the choices he was making. -
Odd book, which I missed during its initial turn 'round the great fairy-tale wheel of the 80s. (The Minneapolis 80s, I almost said, but that's an overgeneralization.)
The book is based on an obscure murder ballad -- rather, on a modern reconstruction of it. (The period ballad, "The Famous Flower of Serving-Men", doesn't have much of a plot.) William Flower, a nicely-turned-out young man of no declared birth, stumbles out of a storm into the King's castle, declaring that he's looking for a job.
We then flip to the tower of a sorceress, Lady Margaret, who is arranging to have a household slaughtered by mercenary bandits. This turns out to be a flashback. (The book is plagued by poorly-marked flashbacks; I often had to chew through several pages before figuring out that somebody was the wrong age.) There is necromancy and kinslaying afoot, not to mention crossdressing, poorly-managed invasions, and the bitter disillusionment of teenage crushes.
The storyline adheres to Martin Carthy's recording strictly, in its main points -- except for the ending, which goes for realistic awkwardness rather than fairy-tale pat. I wish more of the storyline had done that. The ballad plot beats feel forced, and the "real" plot is a lot of reaction and secondary characters dancing around while waiting for the big ballad climax. The big climax is not, in fact, a genre-fantasy battle between William and Margaret -- I'm not saying it should be -- but maybe *some* kind of conflict would have served the novel? William barely *does* anything.
One could argue that this whole book is a slice-of-life portrayal of William in Cyngesbury, while in the background news reports roll in of Margaret slowly but surely shooting herself in the foot. Neither is particularly novelistic.
Positives: the life that we see sliced is realistically medieval, as far as I can tell. I'm no expert, but it felt like period idiom, period points of view, and period dirty jokes. Also, no cheap fantasy-cliche (or romance-cliche) conflicts driving the plot. Negatives: as noted above, not much driving the plot at all.
It's worth noting that Margaret, explicitly an Evil Witch (plots murder, spreads plague, summons demons from Hell, not a lot of ambiguity there), is not *treated* as evil in her half of the story. The narration follows her plaguing and murdering attempts with the same dispassionate focus as William's... well, William's attempts to run a kitchen and keep people from falling in love with him. (Really, that's his primary goal. You see why I keep squinting at the plot.) Anyhow, I was impressed by this narrative balance at first, but I eventually decided it wasn't *good* for anything; Margaret's foot winds up shot and that's the end. She is not even the heroine of her own story. Best I can say about it. -
This is billed, on the book's back cover, as Fantasy/Lesbian and Gay Literature. That's because one of the three major characters is a man who loves other men, and another is a woman disguised as a man. The theme of gender ambiguity is intimately intertwined with the theme of homosexual love.
The novel is also very much fantasy for grown-ups, in that the author, Delia Sherman, eschews the conventional happy ending of the genre in favor of a more realistic, although still moving and satisfying, resolution. And also in that, unlike most fantasy fiction, in which events are driven by a quest for victory over other characters who are allied with dark forces external to themselves, in Through a Brazen Mirror ("brazen" here carries the medieval meaning of "brass" -- the mirror is made of brass), the quest is more to conquer, or at least understand and come to terms with, one's own interior self.
Sherman has a doctorate in Renaissance Studies, and her deep knowledge is admirably apparent in the dialogue and narrative. Not the breath of a hint of anachronistic language or usage here. -
I love Lionel; he was hilarious. I feel bad for him, though, forever closeted and marrying a girl he doesn't love. But perhaps they can be friends. I feel really bad for Elinor, losing her husband and seven children, poor thing.
A nice touch, I thought, was how there wasn't a standard alphabet. It's something you wouldn't think to do, but makes perfect sense for the time. Although I will say that the dialogue took me out of the story a little. I could understand what they said (and their was admittedly little dialogue at all), but it wasn't as smooth as the rest of the narrative.
A bittersweet ending, a bit anticlimactic, but a thoroughly good read. -
I may have been disappointed by this book because it was oversold to me as THE MOST GROUNDBREAKING WORK OF FANTASY EVAR. I think if it had been just positioned as an enjoyable retake on certain fantasy tropes I would have a more positive review. I found the characters somewhat two dimensional (and one verging into Mary Sue territory). The ending left me cold. I did like the magical system she drew up in the novel; it was clearly playing by a set of rules and I would have liked to have seen it expanded on further.
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This book is based on fragments of an old English ballad that was reconstructed the ‘70s. It’s about a woman who dresses up as a man and becomes advisor to the King. It’s sort of a “Victor/Victoria” story, but told in medieval times and very serious. I found it a little dry, but I really enjoyed it. Sherman has wonderful prose and story-telling ability. She’s gone on to be nominated and win several awards for her period pieces and her YA work.
Come visit my blog for the full review…
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo... -
A nice little alternative-universe gender-bendy fantasy in which no one gets a happy ending. I approve.
The characterization is a little thin, and the main character, especially, is more opaque than s/he should be to truly win over the reader; the worldbuilding is excellent, clearly done by someone who has thought seriously about the medieval/Renaissance day-to-day experience; the system of magic is quite tidy and elegant. -
An excellent novel all around. DS is one of the very few authors who can create a realistic and consistant medieval world. Issues of gender and sexuality are dealt with with the mores of the time, which are a bit different from our own. Her characters were all multi-faceted characters, none of whom understand themselves. Even the villain is sympathetic.
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Fondly remembered fascinating retelling/reinterpretation of the traditional ballad "The Famous Flower of Serving Men."It's a book that has stayed with me for years after I read it. Recommended!
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Quiet, but in a good way.
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Sometimes I buy something to read and it gets so lost on my shelves that I don't read it until years later. The Ultra Violet Library edition of Delia Sherman's Through a Brazen Mirror was one of those, thus I don't remember what led me to put it on my amazon Wish List. I do remember that when I received it I realized that I'd already read this novel many years earlier, when it was published by Ace.
The first time around I thought it was okay and mainly remembered it fondly based on a surprise twist followed by an even greater "OMG, she went There." This time around it didn't work. It looks like the twist and its follow-up were the only thing going for it for me, and when I came in already knowing where it was going I could see the flaws better.
It's written in a third person that wavers between close and omniscient. Background information on the characters is sometimes delivered in an awkward fashion, a flood of "tell." The dialogue is written in an olde tyme style that sometimes descends into what sounded nearly like grating dialect to me, such as "Wilt stand and smirk when thee father do ask thee fair where thou'st been?" The character the plot revolves around is a cipher even past the point where she should be a cipher. The deus ex machina comes straight from the ballad, but it's so obviously and totally a deus ex machina that I was kind of stunned. I mean, there are ways of making it less blatant or at least making the plot gift come a little more hard-won to the characters. The resolution seems rushed, and one character's change of personality and vocation seems to come out of nowhere.
It's based on a ballad I never read, so I can't say how much of the plot stuff I disliked comes from the source material, but here are things that pinged against my personal tastes.
This puts me against the grain again, as Through a Brazen Mirror had been nominated for a John W. Campbell Award.
The Ultra Violet Library edition has an introduction by Ellen Kushner partly as a "damn, Delia Sherman's good" and partly as a way to give Sherman's queer bonafides as her partner, I guess. However, the tone swings weirdly between "li'l Delia does lots of research and gets all A's!" and "Delia likes piña coladas and getting caught in the rain." Yes, they weren't together when Sherman first submitted the manuscript, but I don't expect objectivity at the time the introduction was written. Kushner also says she and Sherman prefer the more historically accurate Ultra Violet cover to the Ace cover, but as the Ultra Violet cover looks like it's done in radioactive hues and has everyone wearing nuclear self-tanner I could only shake my head.
Finally, though, the Ultra Violet edition takes away from this story, for me at least, by making the twist and surprise revelations in the story the selling point, revealing it right up front in its summary of the book. I read the Ace edition around the time it came out in 1989, so seeing Going in to Through a Brazen Mirror knowing this will happen left me with a somewhat clumsy and otherwise standard medieval-style fantasy.
But your mileage may vary. -
I grabbed this book on Novemeber 30 when I was still reveling in the ecstacy of the end of National Novel Writing Month, and I just bought it at half price books because I only had to pay $1.50 for it.
Also because I read The Fall of the Kings and liked it.
This book, not so much. I had to go Wikipedia-ing because of my lamentable ignorance of middle age ballads (I had this feeling that the entire book was some sort of an inside joke I didn't get until the internet enlightened me) But that is not what killed the book for me. What killed the book was the ending, where the coolest character was killed and nobody got the guy or the girl. It was terribly depressing and when I was done I threw the book against the wall.
Thumbs up for crossdressing.
Thumbs down for stupid twist endings. -
I was excited about this book, which I read because it is based on an old English ballad, "The Famous Flower of Serving Men." I thought the characters were a little flat, or at least none of them engaged me. Some might be put off by the book's designation as "queer fantasy," (or at least by the ads in the back of one of the editions for queer erotic fantasy). However, I thought the predominant theme didn't have as much to do with gender, as it did with how people see what they want to see. Everyone sees the main character, a female masquerading as a male, as what they want to see.
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There was nothing wrong with this book per se, but I've never been much for gender benders and I guess in the end it just couldn't hold my interest. I love reading about strong female characters but sometimes I felt that the main character's opinions seemed a little too obviously modern instead of her being a strong woman who was still of her times. Who knows, maybe one day I'll try it again.
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How bizarre/disconcerting/unfortunate ... I'm about 90% sure that I had a review of this before, or at least a rating.
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My review from March 5, 1998
My review from February 6, 2005