SANCTUARY: A Tale of Life in the Woods - Hardcover

Monette, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684832860 ISBN 13: 9780684832869

Publisher: Scribner, 1997

Synopsis

The final work by the critically acclaimed late author presents a classic fairy tale that brings the world of the Great Horned Owl to life as he sets his intolerant agenda for the forest, perceptively capturing the strangeness of society's rules and the liberating nature of love. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

In Paul Monette's deceptively simple fable, Sanctuary, Renarda the fox and Lapine the rabbit fall in love in an enchanted forested watched over by a benevolent witch. That Renarda and Lapine are both female and of different species proves no impediment to their love, until the witch mysteriously disappears and her familiar, the Great Horned Owl, takes over. Suddenly, the animals are advised to "keep an ear cocked for any behavior that doesn't feel quite right," and all at once Renarda and Lapine are banished to separate parts of the forest.

Activist and writer Paul Monette authored six novels and four collections of poetry, including National Book Award-winner Becoming a Man, before succumbing to AIDS in 1995. Renarda and Lapine's eventual triumph over the forces of fear and ignorance is an apt memorial for a man who led the fight against both for so many years.

From Publishers Weekly:

"It may not have been?how could it have been??the very last forest. But to all the creatures who lived there...." Like a shaman, Monette?the novelist, poet, essayist, AIDS activist and National Book Award winner (Becoming a Man) who died of AIDS in 1995?creates a magic space within this animal fable, which resonates with wisdom and grace. This posthumous offering is an amazingly tender parable of same-sex love full of political overtones sounding Monette's lifelong themes of social justice, the need for tolerance of diversity and the fluid nature of sexual selves. The romantic love that blossoms between Renarda the Fox and Lapine the Rabbit is doubly wrong in the eyes of the dictatorial Great Horned Owl who presides over their forest realm?wrong because it's interspecies and because it's between two females. The Owl (not a wise bird here) commands all the forest creatures to spy on one another and to report any "differentness." By splitting up the forest's denizens into two races?First Ones and second-class "refugees"?the Owl sows antagonism and fear, fostering a network of spies and snitches. The lovers, once discovered, are charged with "crimes against nature," arrested and banished to separate rehabilitation camps, until a bumbling apprentice wizard, Albertus the Lesser, exposes the Owl as an impostor and transforms the forest into a haven of tolerance and love. Monette's complex, quicksilver prose aims at the heart and never misses. His entrancing tale is illustrated throughout with luminous, spectral pictures that enhance the moonlit aura of enchantment.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684832860
• ISBN 13: 9780684832869
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96
• Illustrator: Flesher Vivienne