Margery Kempe, Robert Glück

I really love The Book of Margery Kempe, so I had to go through a bit of a process to recognize that this wasn’t that book, and wasn’t meant to be. It’s tricky, though, because part of the project here IS retelling Margery’s story, and so part of me bristled, and just wanted to go and re-read her version. But Glück is focused on something more specific here: he zooms in on the sexual dimension of the story and its relation to devotion (both egotistical and abject), and re-imagines it in all its glory. And he pairs it with a contemporary tale of a sexual obsession an older man has for a younger one. It wasn’t until I got to the end of the book that I really started to appreciate how interesting the experiment with voice is, and then I immediately felt like I wanted to start over from the beginning (and also reread Margery Kempe).