Eye

THE EYE contains fourteen short stories centered on Greek myths, lore, prophesy, and women healers. The writing is not straight forward, but open to interpretation by the reader. Eyes feature in many of the stories, often in the guise of the evil eye, but as the reader reflects on this, it becomes more of the eye into the soul. The first story is from a boy’s viewpoint when he finds a head on the beach with eyes that seem to look at him, and then he seems to be seeing things before they happen. Women help him overcome his distress. The remaining stories are mostly from the adult women, first person viewpoint. Some settings seem contemporary or recent past times, and one from ancient times about a woman who becomes an ancient goddess. Belief, inevitable change, and life are important concepts in the stories, along with how women cope with changing from child, to mother, to crone. They contain many elements most women will identify with as they go through life’s changes. These stories are also steeped in mystery about life, gods, and invisible forces and feel somewhat psychological with insights the reader must interpret. The writing can be a little convoluted but that is part of the interpretation process.

Eye by Marianne Micros is a beautiful, enchanting, true book published by Guernica Editions about Greek folklore, customs, traditions and the so-called old-world. In the past people were more connected with the natural world and they believed in witches, fairies, the enchanted world, and the sphere connected with the unknown often spoused or the devil and creatures associated to him, or fairies.
This book is dedicated to Alice, the mother's author dead at the age of 91. She was an healer and someone in grade to repel the evil eye.
Let's start by here: why this title?

It was tradition, also in our land, to think that someone could curse with his/her eyes someone from the beginning (but people could be cursed also once adults) and so this baby would have always had a special eye, the evil eye; or someone, wishing him all the bad of this world, would have seen modified his/her future; in this case you searched for a healer in grade to see if it was true; they used water and oil and if the answer was positive the healer would have broken this curse with special prayers, herbs and lotions.
In this sense the first tale, involving a kid affected by this dangerous eye will reveal hidden answers able to be known just if the person had that terrible eye.
In other tales we will discover the love of a mother for a magical creature, an intruder of the magical world in their family, while her son was back after 20 years of absence. The answer will be drastic.
Another short tale will focus on a girl transformed in a cow by Hera because jealous of the attention that Zeus, a great play-boy, (with all the respect) dedicated her.
In other tales we will meet difficult realities, painful ones, sometimes, existences surrounded by mystery and superstition but every tale is magical, pure magical, trust me.
Go for it if you love these kind of books and stories. The stories, are narrated with the language and style of a story-teller; plus I love this book so badly because part of these stories are part of our folklore as well.

Highly recommended.

I thank NetGalley and Guernica Editions for the ebook.

Anna Maria Polidori

As a long-time English professor at the University of Guelph, Marianne Micros taught folktales among other things, and this influence is clear in her short story collection Eye, recently published by Guernica Editions. Also evident is the influence of her Greek mother, to whom the book is dedicated.

For these are short stories that weave folktales and mythology together with contemporary life. We start with a young boy seeing visions of the future after discovering the head of Orpheus on a beach, and in later stories we meet Ariadne in a labyrinth, Io transformed into a cow, and others.

There are also non-Greek legends and folktales. One of my favourite stories was The Changeling’s Brother, inspired by an English folktale about changelings—fairy children secretly substituted for human ones. In Micros’s version, Johnnie comes home from war to discover that his younger brother Willy, whom he last saw 20 years ago, is still a baby. What’s worse, he is “not the cooing, giggling, chubby brother I remember but some creature with a withered old face and wrinkled body. Pale, then, whining.”

Johnnie’s mother refuses to accept that anything is wrong with her 20-year-old baby, insisting that “He’s just a weak one, Johnnie. He’s always been like this.” At first, it seems as if this will be a straightforward confrontation between Johnnie and his mother, until we discover that Johnnie’s own motives are more complicated, thanks to an experience he had in the woods when he was sixteen, being invited to dance by a fairy woman with long golden hair who has haunted his dreams ever since. The story’s conclusion involves another substitution, but not the one we might have expected. It’s a clever twist on an old tale, which is what you could say about the collection in general.

In the dedication for Eye, Micros discloses that her mother was “a natural healer, who know how to repel the evil eye.” These healers appear regularly in the stories, either as the main character or as subsidiary ones. They are midwives, healers, nurses, brewers of potions, givers of advice. The modern world is intruding on theirs—this is a central theme of the title story, Eye—but the traditional healers still play an important role. They are guardians of a heritage that, like the legends passed down for thousands of years, serves an important purpose that is not diminished by our recent delusion of scientific omniscience.

By setting most of these stories in the present day, Micros creates a sense of all these traditional legends still existing in our contemporary world whether we admit it or not, whether we notice them or not. I don’t want to say that she makes them relevant, because I don’t think that things needs to be recent to be relevant. But reading Eye by Marianne Micros is a satisfying and thought-provoking experience. You get a sense of the melding of different cultures and different eras in a new form.