New Yorker Fiction Review #204: "Christina the Astonishing (1150 - 1224)" by Kristin Valdez Quade

Review of a short story from the July 31, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

Interesting concept for a short story here as Kristin Valdez Quade takes a first-person observer approach to the life of Saint Christina the Astonishing, a woman from what is now Belgium who supposedly died at age 21 and then came back to life and lived another 50 or so odd years, roaming the countryside and apparently hurling accusations and prophesies at people.

This story is told through the eyes of Christina's older sister, Mara, who watches as Christina grows from troublesome infant, to moody, seemingly-possessed child, and then watches as she dies the first time and is resurrected.

As the main character struggles to understand and cope with her sister's condition (which today we'd probably have a medical name for) the story really becomes about how we love our family members in spite of not being able to understand them and, very often, feeling distant from the people we should feel closest too.

I also see it as a story about being misunderstood. In the 12th century, the language they had for things like depression, anxiety, and paranoid schizophrenia existed within the realms of religion. If they had any language for mental illness, it was pretty rudimentary. Frankly, Christina was probably lucky to be simply "misunderstood" and relegated to life as a wandering itinerant servant of God, as opposed to being burned for being a witch.

I've never loved "gimmick" stories like this, my least favorite being the "fairy tale made commonplace" kind of story, in which a woman tries to date the grown-up Pinocchio, or about Rapunzel's domestic woes 10 years after she's been rescued by the prince, or what have you. I like this kind of story a bit more because, in spite of the fact that it does have a "gimmick," being based on the life of an actual saint, it is not done in a tongue in cheek way; there are no moments in which you can hear Kristin Valdez Quade giggling to herself as she writes.

In the end, this story is really "about" the lives of two women whom history would have completely forgotten if it weren't for some unexplained and odd circumstances that elevated one of them to Sainthood. We can only wonder how many people like Christina have lived and continue to live tortured, misunderstood, and unfulfilled lives because we do not and did not have the language or technologies to help them.