"Gaskell, Jane - Atlan Saga (Cija) 05 - Some Summer Lands UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskell Jane)

infancy, out into the unfair world. Forever disillusioned,
somehow Cija never gives up hope that things, and people,
will improve- At the same instant Cija shows she has grasped
that this is most unlikely. Never "Tragic," there comes to be
a sadness in her soul.

I read the first booksЧThe Serpent. The Dragon, then
published as one volumeЧas an unputdownable adventure.
That it was beautifully and often very humorously written,
that the characters, even when giant size, were totally credi-
ble, that the writer understood their psychology, and human
psychology at largeЧall that I took for granted as, with the
best books, one often does. Grabbing up and gobbling my
way through Allan later, the same process worked on me. I
was ecstatic over her use of words, and her comments on the
mortal condition, and the fact that she could make the most
exotic of things seem as normal as tea and toastЧwhile
losing nothing of their foreignness, the peculiarity of what
she conveyed. And, again, 1 couldn't put the book down. We

X SOME SUMMER LANDS

had to wait for the third* novel. The City. The day I got it, 1
was almost afraid to startЧthis wasn't so long as the others.
If I wasn't careful, I might finish it in a night. (By dint of
great control. I made it last two.) Like the others, it had an
episodic story-line that pulled you headlong, passages of
description that made the mouth water, laughter and rage, and
by now a touch of proper bitterness, for to live Cija's life
would be, surely, no joke- But there was beginning, too, to
be something more. I detected it, reveled in it, explained it to
myself this way: That -by now Cija had enough past for both
heroine and writer to recall and re-examine it in the light of
subsequent events.

From about sixteen, I had read elsewhere in Ms. Gaskell's
oeuvres, always fascinated by what I found there. But the
element in me that was currently making of me primarily a
fantasy writer made the Cija books my primary target. If I
was low, or had flu, 1 would go back to The Serpent and start
right in again. I'd bathe the gray areas of mind and heart in
those wet forests, volcanic cities, those wolf winters, those
sunsets of red skulls. I think that at the date of writing this,
late in 1984, I can guess I have read the first Atlan novels
about five times each, and the first volume six. After Allan,
anyway, mere came the longest wait of ali.

There was a problem, too, in the case of Cija. I suppose I
instinctively felt that. Even though the last book. The City,
had ended on one of the great cliff-hanging sequel-setters of