Dear Reader,Texts we have read constitute the libraries in our heads and shape us. Then those libraries direct us towards texts that can be appropriate additions to the archives up there. So, when I got an email stating that Aleph is bringing to India Louise Glück’s only published piece of fiction, Marigold and Rose, the librarian in my head immediately sent me a memo asking me to pick it up.Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. I must confess that I haven’t read any of her works until now, chiefly because she wrote poetry, a category I usually avoid (poems stump me, unless they are by Dorothy Parker). However, in this Odyssey season, when all works connected to the epic are being dredged up, I recently read her poem, “Circe’s Grief”. It is in the voice of the sorceress with whom Odysseus had a romp (as well as an illegitimate son, according to some versions), and whom he abandoned eventually, because, well, the hero has to go home. The poem, which is highly condensed and short, can be quoted in full here: In the end, I made myselfKnown to your wife asA god would, in her own house, inIthaca, a voiceWithout a body: shePaused in her weaving, her head turningFirst to the right, then leftThough it was hopeless of courseTo trace that sound to anyObjective source: I doubtShe will return to her loomWith what she knows now. WhenYou see her again, tell herThis is how a god says goodbye:If I am in her head foreverI am in your life forever.I was thrilled by this superbly-executed case of vengeance. Circe, in this poem, could not care less for being forgiving—indeed, why forgive a man who has shamelessly shared her bed and enjoyed her hospitality for months before suddenly realising that he loves his wife more? Revenge is a kind of wild justice, a great man once said. Circe hacks into the mind of Penelope and stays there as a constant voice, so that the wife can never be technically alone again with her husband. The precious marriage is ruined.What makes the poem chilling are the clipped lines, which come like the icy cold breath of an angry goddess. It also says much more than what it spells out: for instance, the phrase, “In the end”, at the very beginning, suggests that Circe has thought long and hard about other effective plans of revenge before zeroing in on this idea. What is scariest is the implication that she is there in Odysseus’ head too—the poem is addressed to him. Circe’s revenge is foolproof and complete.The same characteristics—brevity, sharpness, a tendency to drop innocuous sounding but devastating truth bombs—are evident in Marigold and Rose. A novella of just 61 pages, it is epic in the way it traces the contours of the human psyche as it struggles to create meaning out of chaos and leave its mark in the face of mortality.Marigold and Rose are two baby girls—twins—“I am half a baby, Marigold thought. I am the brain and Rose is the heart. Or was it the other way?” They might be one as well, two sides of the same consciousness constantly in conversation with itself. Of course, as toddlers, they cannot speak (though Rose starts talking in the course of the novella) in reality. But Glück imagines the thoughts racing through their minds. Maybe babies do think, in a pre-linguistic way—who knows.Nothing much happens here, but time passes. Grandma dies, Mother tries to take up a job but then decides against it, and the twins turn one. The last occasion is celebrated with a party that Marigold hates, and Rose revels in, because of all the attention she gets. “[Marigold] looked grimly out at the party from her high chair. Chaos and imprecision, she thought. Grown-ups were milling about... Meanwhile people they didn’t know were touching them and calling them lambs and chickens though it was perfectly obvious they were human babies. Aging human babies, Marigold thought.”The entire novella has a To the Lighthouse feel—a preparation for a non-event, which is also momentous, because it signifies a progression, an advancement towards (self-) knowledge, which, by its very appearance, signals the death of the unthinking innocence of childhood, but is also the best compensation we have for the loss.The whiff of death is stronger around Marigold than Rose. Marigold, the younger and weaker baby, has already chosen the life of the mind and keeps scribbling invisibly in her invisible book, which (hopefully) will become a reality in her adulthood, while Rose is happier with the material reality. But both feel the creeping shadow of melancholy as they grow.“In their different ways they loved this period. It was possible still to feel safe. They didn’t know this was what they felt until the feeling disappeared, though initially they were distracted, like all babies, by feelings of triumph. First crawling, then walking and climbing, then talking. Their clothes stopped fitting... Infinite possibility—something they both felt. Then an absence or loss. Safety, which had disappeared.”The novella progresses—rather, pools up—through the push and pull between such contrary modes and feelings—a beginning which is an end, a triumph which is a defeat, a growing up which is a growing old. Since the entire drama is presented through the thoughts of babes, it might have sounded twee, but doesn’t, because of Glück’s spare prose.Marigold and Rose was a good introduction to Glück for me. I have now started reading her Pulitzer-winning poetry collection, The Wild Iris. The first two lines of the eponymous poem has already sent a shaft through my heart, and I fear I am taking to poetry other than Parker’s:At the end of my sufferingthere was a door.***Some were taken aback when Glück won the Nobel. She is certainly not the Nobel “type”—she steered clear of isms, did not agitate about the state of the nation, did not write about Jewish guilt despite being Jewish by birth. Reclusive and withdrawn, she hardly gave interviews. In one rare interview in The Paris Review, she speaks in the terse, severely controlled language of her poetry.Yet one can detect feminist strains in her writing—what is “Circe’s Grief” if not a feminist poem? And Marigold and Rose leaves subtle hints about a gender-unequal world, such as the cheeky but loaded statement, “[I]t was well known that Mother had more on her plate. Father just had wine on his plate.”The two fiction books reviewed in the latest Frontline issue are more overtly feminist, by comparison. Both foreground women, giving them voice, autonomy, and agency, while allowing them their flaws. Shuma Raha’s novel, The Sea Has the Answers, and Sucheta Dasgupta’s short-story collection, Ladies’ Night, are books to look out for, going by the superb reviews. Read Anjali Chauhan’s analysis of The Sea here and Aditi Mishra’s evaluation of Ladies’ Night here.See you again soon. Till then, Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor,FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS