That Same Flower: Floria Aemilia's Letter to Saint Augustine - Hardcover

Gaarder, Jostein; Born, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374253846 ISBN 13: 9780374253844

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998

Synopsis

Floria Aemilia, a concubine to St. Augustine for more than ten years prior to his spiritual awakening, challenges St. Augustine's view of women and love as described in his Confessions, in a passionate and occasionally erotic fictional letter addressing faith, doubt, and human relationships.

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Reviews

Again using the device of a text-within-a-text, Norwegian writer Gaarder (The Christmas Mystery, 1996, etc.) presents the story of the woman whom Augustine abandoned when he answered God's call to the celibate life. In a brief introduction, the author describes how he stumbled upon an ancient Latin manuscript in a Buenos Aires bookshop, then bought it, believing it to be the only known letter to Augustine from Floria, his lover and the mother of his son. Written in response to Augustine's Confessions, which she has just read, the letter has the biting tone of a woman scorned, but also the drive of a fearless intellect, one able point by point to poke holes in Augustine's defense of his conversion, wittily wielding the big guns of classical philosophy from Aristotle to Cicero on her own behalf. As Floria coolly dismantles Augustine's faith, showing it to be selfish and contradictory, she doesn't shy away from memories of her former intimacy with him: their first meeting beneath a fig tree in Carthage; the youthful excesses of her ``little itchy- fingered bedfellow''; the interference of Augustine's mother, Monica, who wanted him to marry someone his social equal and who came all the way to Milan to split up the two of them, forcing Floria to leave Augustine and their son and go back to Carthage; and the couple's final meeting in Rome after Monica's death, when a few passionate weeks abruptly ended with the man of God beating his temptress until she bled, then apologizing in tears for his brutality. For all her bitterness, though, Floria also writes with compassion; her judgment, tempered by love and worldliness, never condemns even when discussing their dead son, whom she never saw again after she left Milan. A colorful exercise in breathing life into classical texts, but one that unhappily fails to loose the ties that bind it to the role of commentary, thus falling short of life as a full-fledged work of fiction. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374253846
• ISBN 13: 9780374253844
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 167