Customer Rating:  
Summary: bring down the exceptional
Comment:
Mariette is a nun who is a true believer. She is close to God, has visions and can bestow blessings.
As is the frequent human reaction to anyone who is gifted or special, jelousy runs rampant. The normal or average or non-gifted plot to bring her down.
The only flaw in the book occurs when Mariette exhibits behavior that borders on blasphemy. This is inconsistent with the flow of the story.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Glimpses of passion, of ecstasy
Comment: "Mariette in Ecstasy" is a work of passion, a work of ecstasy, of faith, of doubt, of commitment, of agape love, the Devil, the sublime.
Mariette Baptiste becomes a postulate in the Convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion in New York in the early 1900's. Her sister, twenty years older, is Mother Superior. The convent is a place of religious devotion, days filled with prayer and service, farm work and quiet times devoted to the arts of keeping house. There is study for the postulates. It is a quiet life, a contemplative life. Everyone is part of the flow.
Then comes Mariette and gradually the peace is disturbed. Not intentionally, mind you. Gradually. For you see, Mariette's palms begin to bleed, her feet bleed, her side bleeds. She goes into trances. Stigmata? Here in our simple cloister? Why would God visit such a miracle on us here in this obscure place?
Ron Hansen has written a book of sublime faith, or is it faith? The prose is as lush and beguiling as Mariette's young body. He creates a kind of word art, designing his sentences to resemble single lines of nuns going into the choir loft, outside in the fields, going to the barn, picking grapes.
Gorgeous prose takes away your breath: "Horsetails of gray smoke rise from the candles at Vespers." "Blood scribbles down her wrists and ankles and scrawls like red handwriting on the floor." "She hears firewood wheezing and thudding apart inside the iron stove." "Easy water rustles over stones beneath a Queen Anne's lace of ice."
The hush of deception begins early. Again, wordsmith Hansen provides just a few lines at a time suggesting support of stigmata or its deception. The reader is held in quietly building suspense. This is a cloister. Expect no car chases here.
That is all I can tell. Oh, one more thing. The last paragraph, the very last paragraph holds the key. The ending is absolutely stunning. I gasped and tears poured from my eyes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Mar-iette, like a flaw."
Comment: Upon her entry as a postulant into the Priory of the Sisters of the Crucifixion, 17-year old Mariette Baptiste corrects a nun who mispronounces her name. The first syllable, she says, doesn't sound "like a [female] horse," but rather like a "flaw" (p. 15).
This interchange sets the stage for the mystery that lies at the heart of this skillfully crafted novel, which I recently reread and enjoyed even more than I did the first time around. After just a few weeks in the convent, Mariette begins to experience visions ("ecstasies") that eventually culminate in stigmata. Some of her sister-nuns, as well as the ancient priest who says mass and hears confessions at the convent, take the stigmata seriously, and soon fall into a near-veneration of Mariette. Others, either out of envy or credulity, believe that Mariette is mutilating herself. Regardless, though, the entire convent community's quiet, regular, low-keyed life is so disrupted that Mariette is finally expelled from the order.
The obvious question raised by novelist Ron Hansen is whether Mariette's experiences are really "spiritual" or merely "psychological." There's good reason to think the latter: Mariette is under great emotional stress (her father disapproves of her religious vocation, her older sister has just died, she wants desperately to become a saint), and the erotic tension throughout the celibate convent--not to mention within Mariette's own body--is palpable (at one point--pp. 82-85--the sisters perform a skit based on the Song of Songs that clearly allows them to safely act out their sexual desires). Mariette, seething with religious fervor and sexual frustration, is indeed "flawed." So it's easy to surmise that her visions and stigmata may indeed be hysteria.
But more profound questions raised by Hansen's novel are these: could it be that physical and psychological flaws are catalysts rather than disqualifications for genuine spiritual experiences--that God works with broken vessels? If so, why? Because such vessels are poor in spirit? And if God does work through human flaws, how can one distinguish hysteria and histrionics from genuine visions and somatic manifestations? Surely not all human flaws are used by God.
In raising these sorts of questions, Hansen moves the reader beyond simple black/white thinking--religious ecstasies are either real or fake--to a more subtle, more complex, and more authentic examination of the spiritual life in particular and human experience in general. And he does it with such grace, mystery, and occasional poignancy that the characters quiver with life.
Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Believeable!
Comment: Who am I to say whether Mariette's stigmata was indeed real? Self-sacrifice and a longing toward selfless service could have been her calling. As Mother Superior suggested, we may need only be willing to serve in cloistered life; not necessarily be expected to carry out that willingness. Thought-provoking.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Comment: This book is beautifully written- tapping into the spiritual lives of these cloistered women, although fictional somehow helped me tap into a more spiritual side of myself.
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