The Sibyl [Paperback]

Lagerkvist's revision of the mythical Cumaean Sybil's story---obliterating the fact that she lived forever and kept growing older and more decrepit due to her 'wrong wishes'---shows the humanity involved in love as well as the conflicting desire for communion with the godhead. As Sybil grows to understand that her earthly love is more direct and vital than her falsely-rendered role as priestess, or pythia, the reader is able to recognize the discrepancy between dogma and tradition, a faulty tradition in which temple elders uphold customs merely for the sake of profit and reputation rather than due to pure belief in the godhead.

Contrasted with Sybil's story is the story of a man who has crossed paths with Christ. The intermingling of the two different, yet seemingly similar, religious attitudes creates the framework for Lagerkvist's novel and further stresses the humanity inherent in any divine figure or idol. When he states, "Yes, god is evil ... Revengeful toward anyone who dares to love another than him," Lagerkvist not only invokes the Judeo-Christian sentiment of false idol worship, but also considers the strictures that this worship places upon men and women who wish to also partake in earthly, or romantic, love.

A powerful account of the transition from polytheism to monotheism from a very modern author, THE SYBIL is a viable argument against the constraints of any brand of religiosity. This can be seen in its sympathetic and notably human portrayal of a woman who, in mythology, is granted no such sympathy. Lagerkvist's recurring parallels between Sybil and the Virgin Mary prove that religion stems from what came before and in doing so also argues, quite soundly, that the human experience should take precedence over the divine as the "divine is ... alien and repellent and sometimes it is madness." This novel, from the Nobel Prize winning author, is undoubtedly a journey into the human soul, one worth undertaking, one worth pondering, one worth reading with a mind completely open to revision and to the general nature of humanity's lusts and innate flaws.

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Reviewed by kris t kahn, author of ARGUING WITH THE TROUBADOUR: POEMS.

This book, however, delves into the mythological implications of the human being searching for meaning in a world where gods, or God, allows pain and evil to exist. The characters have no names, a feature often found in cosmological and mystical myths to help the reader "step into" the roles found therein. A truly moving account of the pains of being not just called, but Chosen, and of ultimately finding a place for onesself in an often harsh world.

Written in 1956, "The Sibyl" is full of the sense of confusion and loss of the post war era, and Lagerkvist's own, often pessimistic, philosophical debates on the nature of man's significance.

There are some truly rewarding passages in this book, though one of the easy pitfalls is to assume any mention of "god" refers to the Judeau-Christian God, when often the reference is to Apollo, a contextual reference point for the use of one of the more famous Sibyls of history. The myth is ancient, but Par Lagerkvist's retelling is contemporarily bound - and the questions asked are both very old and still presently unanswered.