cover image School for Pagan Lovers

School for Pagan Lovers

Edmund Keeley. Rutgers University Press, $19.95 (295pp) ISBN 978-0-8135-1935-7

Intense and wonderfully detailed, this absorbing story follows two young lovers on an idyllic and formative journey through pre-WW II Greece. Hal Gogarty, a 17-year-old American temporarily living in Salonika, is doing poorly with his studies, so his family hires as his tutor Magda Sevillas, a 20-year-old half-Greek, half-Jewish girl who is enrolled at the same prestigious German School they both despise. The attraction between them is immediate; Hal is filled with adolescent lust and Magda, who is recovering from an earlier unfortunate affair, is drawn to the basically decent and naive young man. Magda's family, however, has arranged a marriage for her, and the desperate girl flees to the island of Thassos with Hal not far behind. It is to be a journey of self-discovery for both of them--delicate, erotic and bittersweet. Keeley, the author of Libation and professor of English and director of the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton, places his radiant lovers against incomparable backgrounds: stone villages with narrow streets, shimmering wheat and barley fields and a myth-saturated island complete with a priapic god. A harsh and inevitable reality cuts short their odyssey, but seldom has the path to wisdom been portrayed with more grace or passion. (Aug.)