I felt as if I were untethered from the earth. Odysseus was gone, and Penelope was here, and I must make her broth.

The book is a spell, and the writer has self-ensorcelled in such a way to access this “tone” or “mode” of observing that is so far removed from the normal day-to-day that you sometimes feel drunk emerging from his universe.

All of this brings to mind Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. In some way a spiritual antipode to Blood Meridian — it’s a b

It is right and proper that women eke out, liberate, take, make, connive to get, assert their right to go home. Home is a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: