Lapvona

“He’d get sweaty, grunting, moving the whip across one shoulder, then the other, wincing and breathing so hard that spit drooled from his mouth, and then he sucked it in and spat it out violently, as though it pleased him, as though the pain felt good.”

Both Jude and Marek practice self-flagellation as a religious observance; since they do not attend church, it is the primary method with which they engage in spirituality. This self-flagellation stems from equating pain with holiness, establishing the theme of Suffering As Salvation. Both characters view their trials as divine, rather than stemming from their own actions or societal failures.

“Marek’s step was outward turning, like a duck’s, and if he didn’t concentrate, the line he’d walk would veer to the right, such was the turning of his body against nature.”

Perhaps due to his incestuous conception or Agata’s abortion attempts, Marek is born with physical differences that impact the way he moves through the world. This description of Marek’s body paints him as someone who is at odds with nature itself. Unlike Ina and Grigor, who learn to act in harmony with the natural world, Marek struggles to find his place. Because of this, he suffers greatly and often acts on impulse to harm those around him.

“Jude understood that the sheep knew that Marek was a baby in his own way, that he would steal their milk for himself if he could, that he would suck the motherhood from them because he was so starving for it.”

This passage establishes the childlike state that Marek remains trapped within throughout the novel, unable to mature or grow. Marek is fixated on securing the parental care he never received from Agata or Jude, the latter of whom only offers attention through beatings. Marek continually seeks parenting from anything and anyone he can, including the sheep, whom he suckles from despite Jude’s warnings.

“When she asked the birds what to do, they answered that they didn’t know anything about love, that love was a distinctly human defect which God had created to counterbalance the power of human greed.”

After being rejected by her community, Ina learned to survive through listening to birdsong and speaking to the birds, showing her closeness to nature. Though she ultimately reintegrates into society, her time away from it gives her perspective that other characters lack. The idea that love is a “defect” reflects the novel’s dark tone, where even those who do feel love—Dibra, Lispeth, Luka, etc.—come to bad ends.

“He had never known injury or hunger, yet he was rawboned and his body often hurt from its own frailty against the cushioned chair or the fine velvet settle. Bed was the only softness that gave his body peace.”

Although Villiam is the wealthiest and most privileged character in the novel, his choice to spend his riches on a stream of endless frivolous entertainment has left him emotionally immature and unsatisfied. Instead of making him stronger, his wealth has made him physically weak and so emotionally damaged that he can’t even register the death of his son, Jacob.

“It was not God’s mercy that had saved the manor from drought, but a tactic long used by lords in seasons without rain.”

While the village of Lapvona suffers great devastation and loss of life due to the drought, life as usual continues at the manor thanks to its hoarding of water. The omniscient narration points out that God’s will has nothing to do with who suffers and who is blessed, noting that these things are determined by societal structures of power. The drought episode is one of the primary ways the novel develops The Dichotomy Between Wealth and Poverty.

“She shared an understanding with the other servants that their lord Villiam was an ill person, a man who had never grown out of childhood, who would die early because of his underdeveloped strength, and whom they were glad was not vindictive or ambitious.”

The servants view Villiam as someone affected in his emotional and mental development, as demonstrated through his preoccupation with games and entertainment rather than actual ruling. They see this lack of ambition as a positive quality since it creates peace at the manor. However, by the end of Lapvona, Villiam has designs of becoming the stepfather of the Christ Child—an ambition that ultimately results in his death through poisoning.

“Jude recognized her madness. It was the same insanity that he’d seen in Agata while she was in labor with Marek, a female power, evil, something he would never understand.”

Jude views women as his rightful property to control and consume. Because of this core misogyny, when he views a woman (Ina) exercising raw power, he immediately feels that it is evil.

“Strange, he thought next, that fire hurts to the touch. Fire gives light. Shouldn’t the darkness hurt instead? Hell ought to be pure darkness. Nothingness.”

Villiam’s servant is an artist at heart, enjoying the process of creation and making sense of things. His observation that the Christian conception of hell is strange comments on the “hell” that the novel’s characters create for themselves through their own ignorance (i.e., “darkness”). This ignorance keeps them repeating the same flawed choices that negatively impact their life, such as Jude’s mistreatment of women, Marek’s murderous impulses, and the villagers’ acceptance of Villiam’s lordship.

“She blamed Marek. He looked just like a bird. A bird whose mother had pushed it from the nest, who’d survived but could barely fly anymore, only flutter around jaggedly and enjoy the attention it got from the snakes, it was so deranged.”

Lispeth’s hatred of Marek stems from his murder of Jacob, the boy she loved. However, she also comes to hate him for abandoning the values and ideals he was raised with to appease Villiam. Her comparison of Marek to a damaged bird shows that she views him as both endangered and misled to the point of not recognizing his own peril. Ironically, the bird imagery links Marek to both Jacob—“pushed” from the cliff after Marek promised to show him some birds—and Marek’s future sibling, whom he promises will become an angel/bird when he is thrown from the same precipice. Marek is both victim and victimizer.

“But eventually the dirt softened and the rain turns to mist, and then a fog hovered, as though God were covering His eyes while the villagers—profoundly changed by the horrors of drought and famine—shrugged off their sins, dismantled their camps, and moved back from the lake to their homes with their belongings.”

During the drought, the villagers must resort to horrible actions in order to survive, including cannibalism. After they return to the village, they once again begin practicing their usual piety and religious observances as though these atrocities never occurred. This collective forgetting is how they survive and keep up the rhythms of organized social living.

“The horse eyes showed her things doubled in size—an apple, her own hand, empty space itself swelled and enlarged, and it made Ina feel that she was witnessing it all close up, without detail, blurry, as though she were huge.”

Ina steals the eyes from Dibra’s horse, taking out her blind ones and letting them shrivel outside her body. Up until this point, she has experienced only fleeting moments of sight brought on by nursing. By using the horse’s eyes, Ina transforms from someone who lives outside of society to someone choosing to reintegrate into society, albeit with heightened knowledge.

“He had worked so hard to feed himself and his family, for the love of God, believing it would earn him a seat in heaven. Now he knew he had been working, in fact, to make heaven on Earth for the lord above.”

Grigor wakes to the truth of who is negatively impacting the villagers’ lives—not God, nor some rogue bandits, but their lord himself, who steals from them in order to maintain his excessive lifestyle. While those who live outside of society’s bounds may struggle in unique ways, they are at least free from the misguided thinking and self-deception of those who support the status quo.

“Still, a few animals disintegrated in the girls’ hands, fur and teeth and cartilage collapsing even upon their approach. The hedgehog, the bats, the marmot, all the lemmings. They preferred to crumble than to be moved away.”

After Dibra and Luka are killed, the servants move Jacob’s taxidermized animals into Dibra’s old chambers. These stuffed animals represent Jacob’s youth and vitality, cut short by Marek. Some of them survive, but others crumble when the servants attempt to move them, symbolically suggesting how some characters can change and adapt to new situations while some crumble or disappear.

“Agata was a prisoner wherever she went—at Jude’s, at the abbey, and now at the manor.”

After her assault by her brother, Agata goes from one captor to another. First, she is captured and raped by Jude, then she escapes to a nunnery that treats her as subhuman, and finally she is confined and drugged by Villiam and Ina. Her tragic life reflects young women’s struggles to find freedom in a society designed to oppress and control them.

“She did not address him like a man, but a neutral soul, and Grigor liked that, finally relieved of what he had felt had been useless for decades—the need to prove his manhood, to be something other than himself.”

Where Jude has misogynistic views of women, Grigor comes to view Ina with respect and admiration. Part of what draws Grigor to Ina is the way she has transcended traditional gender roles and speaks to him like an equal. Grigor’s awakening makes him realize that societal power structures are inherently false constructs.

“Villiam was even suspicious that the wine already stored in the cellar had been tainted somehow. He instructed the servants to bury it all in a far corner of the estate, where the priest promised nothing would leech into the ground and poison the dirt.”

Villiam worries about the wine in the cellar being poisoned, foreshadowing his death at the end of the novel. Marek eventually has Jude bury Villiam in a shallow grave after letting his body decay and bloat for weeks. Rather than the wine infecting the soil, Villiam is consumed and torn apart by animals, becoming fertilizer for Lapvona.

“It seemed lunatic to be eating a crust of bread and sipping a cup of broth and to give thanks for just that. Thanks for nothing? The world was full of bounty.”

Grigor begins to feel suspicious of religious observances because he recognizes that faith has far less influence on abundance and lack than societal structures do. Although he still tries to act with piety and prays before the Christmas meal, Grigor has become curious about alternative ways of living.

“The wife, of course, being a native, understood that lameness or strangeness was a mark of grace. If one suffered purgatory on Earth rather than after death, heaven was easier to access.”

Lapvonians view “lameness” as a mark of grace, showing the way they equate suffering with goodness. They believe that such earthly pains will lessen the need to do penance in the afterlife. The same idea prompts Jude to think that anyone who starves to death will automatically go to heaven.

“Had Barnabas really dedicated himself to that spoiled rat? Was that the great tragedy of his life—had he traded in a life of kissing whomever he pleased to guard the rotten soul of a man who couldn’t clean the shit from his own asshole?”

After deciding that Agata is pregnant with the Christ Child, Father Barnabas begins to feel pressure to be something more than he is: a truly holy man. This leads to night terrors, deep anxiety, and eventually his suicide. Before he dies, he realizes that his ambition brought him no happiness; like Dibra, he wonders if a simpler life might have been more peaceful.

“Perhaps it is most miraculous when God exacts justice even when no human lifts a finger. Or perhaps it is simply fate. Everything seems reasonable in hindsight. Right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by.”

This passage precedes the revelation that both Villiam and Father Barnabas have met untimely ends. The omniscient narrator notes that one can interpret their deaths as divine intervention or destiny, reflecting a central question of Lapvona: whether there is a divine force at work, or whether life is simply chaos and happenstance.

“Grigor had not given up completely. There was something sacred still. He recognized now that the sacred thing had been Ina herself.”

Even though Grigor questions all societal values and structures, he still holds on to the belief that there is something sacred in the world. In the final section, he has an epiphany that Ina is sacred. The many miracles surrounding Ina’s existence, such as her milk production and long lifespan, lend credence to this idea.

“‘If you don’t let God into your heart, you’ll die,’ Ina said. ‘That’s what kills people. Not time or disease.’”

This strange revelation points to how Ina has managed to live longer than anyone else in Lapvona. By opening her heart to the mysterious forces of life outside of her, which she refers to as God, she has conquered death.