The Convent

September 6, 2010
Cross an Almodóvar-esque plot with lean Hemingway prose, and you get the atmospheric latest from Karnezis (The Maze), about an infant boy abandoned on the steps of a convent. The boy is quickly adopted by the Mother Superior, Sister María Inés, who runs the convent with a blend of intense devotion and heterodoxy; she has a painful secret in her past and believes the boy is a sign of God's infinite mercy. Her intense desire to keep the child at the convent, rather than send him to an orphanage in town, increasingly pits her against the convent's other inhabitants, especially Sister Ana, an ambitious nun much aggrieved by perceived slights. When Ana finds a bloodstained cloth buried on the convent's grounds and becomes convinced "that the convent was visited by evil," she sets herself to expelling the devil, with grave consequences for all. The sense of slow-burning doom, rendered in deceptively simple prose, culminates in a series of startling revelations. Even when the disclosure strains credibility, the novel's concern with the claims the past makes on the present makes the emotional investment it asks for well worth it.

October 15, 2010

Sister Maria Ines is the mother superior of only six nuns who remain in the remote convent of Our Lady of Mercy, high in the mountains of Spain in the 1920s. One morning, a nun discovers a newborn baby left on the convent doorstep. Sister Maria Ines regards this as a miracle and as God's reward to her for spending decades atoning for a grievous sin in her youth. She intends to keep the infant and devotes herself completely to the child, though she soon comes into conflict with the bishop and some of the other nuns. The reader may readily figure out the baby's mysterious parentage, but the mother superior persists in her belief in the miraculous, setting the stage for tragedy. VERDICT Greek-born Karnezis, who now lives in London and whose The Maze was shortlisted for the Whitbread, has created a very readable and convincing tale of how years of living in near-isolation while brooding over past mistakes may lead to madness, especially in a sensitive soul in a repressed society.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2010
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable mso-style-name: Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow: yes; mso-style-parent: mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .0001pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-fareast-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: #0400;The six sisters of Our Lady of Mercy live in an isolated, crumbling convent in the Spanish sierra. Their quiet days of solitude and routine are disrupted when a suitcase, punctured with airholes and containing a newborn baby, is discovered at the entrance to the retreat. For the Mother Superior Maria Ines, it is a miracle, a gift from God sent directly to her to atone for a long-ago sin. For the other nuns, the child is a distraction, to say the leastan object that disrupts their ordered life while unexpectedly changing long-established behaviors. Mother Superior, whose once calm and controlled demeanor morphs into an anxious, mistrustful, almost evil being, becomes obsessed with the infant, determined to keep him at all costs. As the jealousies and frustrations of the sisters emerge, the convent becomes less a place of quiet contemplation than a whirlwind of feminine angst. Beautifully written and gently presented, The Convent is part mystery and part fable, a treatise on the meaning of belief, and a journey to a place curiously strange and surprisingly familiar.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)