“Oh, what’s in a name?” Apparently everything, Romeo. In Cheri Lasota’s Artemis Rising, the protagonist is a young girl looking for love when, like with Romeo and Juliet, the question of love is not so simple; in fact, the heart-shape of destiny lives or dies on the pinprick of a name. What is the name of the protagonist? Well, that’s a tough one; the entire love story hinges on the answer. In Artemis Rising, the romantic contest for power is ideological, that is, it takes place between idea systems, between Christianity and paganism, between the omnipotent Truth and various subversive truths. The protagonist, a sympathetic character originally named Eva, is raised as a Catholic by her stringent father and as a disciple of the ancient Greek goddess, Artemis, by her mother. Should the Catholic path to love fail, Eva may actually be named Arethusa, the eponymous sea-nymph raped by the river-god Alpheus and saved by Artemis, or, if that violent strategy doesn’t work out either, Arethusa will be named Isolde the Fair of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ after the doomed damsel of a white knight’s affections, the lover torn from her love and fated for death hunched grieving over a lifeless corpse. Artemis Rising amounts to a hotly contested hermeneutic pitted on the equally hot grounds of love and melancholy.
Artemis Rising is a dark southern gothic set on the Azores, a generic transplant far away from its germinal American south. The novel formally expands beyond the regional limit of the Mason-Dixon line and Faulkner’s timeless bounded south. Artemis Rising may best be described as Flannery O’Connors Wise Blood taken to its furthest fantastical extreme, without ejecting it more disturbing qualities. (Incest, sexual aggression, pagan totemic ritualism: you name it, Artemis Rising’s probably got it.) Don’t be fooled by the island setting; the Azores factor very little into the story’s flux and flow. The novel suggests that the dialogue is jumping back and forth between English and Portuguese, but we only get to see the English with a peppering of ‘native’ Azorean, like mai and pai and obrigado (helpfully defined in an easily accessible glossary for the exclusive ebook formatting). Lasota never explains the ostensibly complex politics amongst Portugal, the Azores, or the United States, where the story opens and closes. And of the intriguing rituals that Lasota uses for scene settings, including bull-fights and ballroom dances, our knowledge about the cultural significance of such practices on the Azores remains the same from the Alpha to Omega of our reading, which is to say, nilch.
But cross-cultural education is not the point of Artemis Rising, nor does it ever claim to be. This is not historicized fiction, but historical fiction. What Lasota wants to do, and what she does very well, is to entertain her readers. Artemis Rising is truly a modern romance. The voices of Lasota’s characters, aristocrats and orphans both, sound like the people in our living rooms. More or less narrated as the protagonist’s stream of consciousness, Artemis Rising holds us
fast in the vortex(t) of an emotional consciousness. In mad throes of desperation, we see Arethusa/ Eva/ Isolde lose sight of what she was doing not just a moment before, and O God we cringe at the thought of her foolishness, her girlishness, we love her for it but oh how it hurts to watch sometimes!!! But it holds my attention fast, anticipating the narrative’s next turn with the touch of a hand or, if we are lucky, a kiss. It kept me reading, and it will probably keep you reading, too. Like a box of girl-scout cookies you just can’t put down, Lasota’s novel promises immediate gratification, without the calories. By Staff Writer, Brent Lightfoot
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