Reading Journal # 10

I thought that Averno was set in the modern time period. This book is regretful, as if someone is trying to makes sense of a change or loss that they do not fully understand.
The narrator remains unnamed, but I think that she is a she. She seems to I think that she values understanding, but she cannot find it. She believes that the earth is unkind and jealous. At one point she points out that the way that Ceres only had one daughter when, as a goddess, she could have had thousands is analogous with the way that the earth could produce but doesn’t, as if it does not want to be fruitful but is unkind and jealously guards what is its. To two things, the way that Persephone ate the pomegranates of hell, sealing her fate as having to return to the underworld, yet at the same time it could refer to her rape. The author reconsiders something in the passage when she says “”You grew up, you were struck by lightning. When oyu opened your eyes you were wired forever to your true love… Unless the shock wasn’t deep enough. Then you weren’t vaccinated, you were addicted.” (24-25)It makes her book more real, as if a real person who is trying to understand the events in their life is thinking the thoughts expressed in the poem. After all, real people second guess themselves, especially when they are dealing with a deep emotional issue. Persephone is pictured as a child who has suffered and lost something and who is growing up to face the doubts and uncertainties of her past. In the second part she is pictured as an adult who has made choices and has to deal with understanding the ways that those choices have both effected her life and been perceived by others. She gave herself to her lover and has since discovered that that occurrence has been described as an abduction and a rape and she has to deal with this metamorphosis that she doesn’t fully understand. I was introduced to the idea of Persephone having feelings, possibly being regretful or possibly loving her husbands, but for the first time she was not mearly the object of the story, she was a player in it.