Marigold and Rose by Louise Gluck

Marigold and Rose is a magical and incandescent fiction from the Nobel
laureate Louise Gluck.
Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V." So
begins Marigold and Rose, Louise Gluck'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 The 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 otherlike 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 (...)

Louise Gluck is the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of
poems. 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.

Picador
On Sale: Oct 10/23
5 x 7.5 • 64 pages
9781250893536 • $22.00 • pb
Fiction / Fairy Tales, Folklore & Mythology