Recent reads

The marriage of Cupid and Psyche, as told by Walter Pater (excerpted from his novel Marius the Epicurean.) At one time I actually intended to read Marius the Epicurean. Pater's prose dissuaded me from this intention within a few pages.

However, his ornate, pseudo-archaic style is more palatable in small doses, and this adaptation of the well-known legend from Apuleius flows quickly by at a modest 64 pages. The first few pages are the toughest going, as two of Pater's rather stilted characters stumble across a copy of Apuleius's Transformations, or The Golden Ass, and being exploring its forbidden tales of magic and misadventure. Once the story of Psyche and her mysterious, supernatural lover begins, Pater's boys are as thoroughly forgotten as Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros. The story is a classic fairy tale, perhaps even a direct ancestor of the kind of tales that the Grimm brothers collected centuries later. Edmund Dulac's stylized watercolor illustrations in this 1951 Heritage Press edition, both naughtily naked and oddly innocent, add an occasional splash of color to the handsome printing.