Synopses & Reviews
Marigold and Rose is a magical and incandescent fiction from the Nobel laureate Louise Gl ck
"Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V." So begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Gl ck's astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka's Metamorphosis, an incandescent act of autobiography.
Here are the elements you'd expect to find in a story of infant twins — Father and Mother; Grandmother and Other Grandmother; bath time and naptime — but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. "Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow." The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. "It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub, playing with the squirting elephant which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty, and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know."
Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book follows thirteen books of poetry and two collections.
Review
"[Marigold and Rose] exists in a liminal zone between poetry and prose...It addresses, in larval and thus primal form, many of the concerns of Glück's poetry." — Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Review
"Reed-slim, it teems with small wisdoms and lilts like a lullaby." — Marley Marius, Vogue
Review
"Luminous...[Marigold and Rose] shimmers with Glück's trademark poetic voice, weaving everyday magic into playpens and cribs." — TIME
About the Author
Louise Glück is the author of over fifteen books of poems and essays. Her many awards include the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962-2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and Stanford University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.