New Moon With Old Moon In Her Arms

In a yearly ritual the citizens of ancient Athens chased a couple in wedding regalia through the streets under a hail of stones, to shouts of "Out with sickness and famine! In with health and wealth!" The broken bodies were left to decompose outside the city gates. Normally the victims would come from among society's downtrodden or outcasts, and exchange their lives for a year of luxury at the city's expense. But in defiance of tradition, and as an expression of protest, a poet from an aristocratic family volunteers her flawless 30-year-old body. This is her story.

KIRKUS REVIEWS: An original myth-laden novella, set in ancient Athens, about a woman who offers herself as a public sacrifice in order to revive a moon goddess cult. In a learned, readable style, Molinaro makes up a feminist fiction that, while occasionally cluttered or pedantic, is finally human and moving. The narrator—a 30-year-old unmarried poet—is kept sumptuously at public expense for a year before the ritual (or "Thargelia'') in which she and a man, a surrogate bride and groom, will be chased through the streets and stoned to death on Expulsion Day. But unlike past victims, who were destitute before the year of public care preceding their deaths, our narrator is affluent from the get-go. At first, she romanticizes her decision, remembering how, as a baby, she was given ``a pebble to throw.'' Now, she is determined to ``throw out the steadily growing discrimination against my sex.'' In the course of the story, she becomes involved with a sponge-diver and his daughter and otherwise reflects, in excerpts from her diary, about myriad things. Likewise, Molinaro, in her own academic voice, pads the story with lit-chit, feminist theory, arcane scholarship, and even commentary about sponge-diving. The result is a historical fiction, written in a postmodernist fragmented style (which mostly works), about a woman who is full of “causes that concerned me only as fillers for my audienceless, loveless life” and who comes finally to a tragic maturity.