Cynthia Ozick in her mid-nineties takes on the Petrie family, specifically Sir Flinders Petrie, Egyptologist, and a long-closed school, now inhabited by ageing trustees, the youngest of whom, our narrator, is a Petrie cousin, once a pupil at the school. The focus of Antiquities is the friendship between Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie and another pupil called Ben-Zion Elefantin, who comes from Elephantine Island in the Nile and is as mysterious as his name. So do the creatures of this novella intertwine. Literally, shadowy, at one point.
I have plenty of patience with high language and erudition. There's something peaceful about having departed the usual narrative realm. My own life seems to lurch among extremes of human life, I can take refuge in tales like this one, whose main strength is in unresolved airing of past events. I've read most if not all of Cynthia Ozick's earlier books.
Cynthia Ozick is a climb at first; though eventually I was cruising on all I'd never know about the Petrie men and Ben-Zion Elefantin, then I was ready for The Patients All Seemed Happy by Lianne O'Hara some thirty pages of realigned language from the archive of Grangegorman, for a hundred years the biggest mental hospital in Ireland. Grangegorman is now the campus of the Technological University of Dublin.
They are not sure where to put me. /Hunger is no excuse for larceny.
I tell them I am with child and push /out my belly on the exhale.
No one believes a lunatic.
The floors shine with effort and soap. /My mouth is inspected for foul language
but I show them nothing. / Strange hands fondle my stomach.
(Still in doubt, I think.)
The walls are cold and smooth. / I hear the echo of a voice:
The majority of those seeking discharge were unfit cases.
I wonder if I am an unfit case.
