illuminating

From: Las parabras del silencio

“[The Voynich] manuscript, now housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, has elicited enormous interest, resulting in numerous books and Internet sites with no conclusive resolution on the manuscript's origin. Even the US National Security Agency has taken an interest in its cryptic contents, and doctoral theses have been written on attempts to decipher the language of the Voynich Manuscript.

     HerbalGram's feature article by Arthur O. Tucker, PhD, and Rexford H. Talbert, titled ‘A Preliminary Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript,’ is based on a unique, investigative approach to understanding the strange manuscript. Past researchers have attempted to prove that the manuscript was a product of Europe, mainly because it was discovered in Italy, but also because they believed a European language to be hidden in the writing system of the text. Other theorists proposed Asian origins based on the premise that cloaked Chinese characters existed within syllabary of the Voynich Manuscript. As with many of humankind's most enduring mysteries, aliens have been implicated as well.
     Dr. Tucker — botanist, emeritus professor, and co-director of the Claude E. Phillips Herbariumat Delaware State University — and Mr. Talbert, a retired information technologist formerly employed by the US Department of Defense and NASA, decided to look first at the botanical illustrations in the Voynich Manuscript and compare them to the world's geographic plant distribution at the time of the manuscript's first recorded appearance (ca. 1576-1612).
     The similarities between a plant illustrated in the Voynich Manuscript and the soap plant depicted in the 1552 Codex Cruz-Badianus of Mexico — considered the first medical text written in the New World — propelled the authors down a path leading to the identification of 37 plants, 6 animals, and 1 mineral in the manuscript from the Americas — specifically, from post-Conquest Nueva España (New Spain) and the surrounding regions.”
— Digital Journal
Read more…

Out of Time, Out of Place

"Irma Voth, the narrator of the Canadian writer Miriam Toews’s new novel, has a name that sounds as if she’s a plucky 19th-century heroine, and she has a life imported from another century as well. Irma is a Mennonite living on an isolated farm near the city of Chihuahua, Mexico, where her family fled from Canada after the death of Irma’s older sister.
     'We live like ghosts,' Irma says of the Mennonites. This strict Christian sect has a history of abrupt departures after persecution by governments that grow tired of their quest to live, as Irma puts it, 'purely but somewhat out of context.' Nineteen-year-old Irma herself is now living completely out of context, having been expelled by her father for marrying a Mexican, who promptly disappeared. She lives alone in a house near her family, discouraged from talking to them, not quite sure how everything went so wrong. [...]
     This is Toews’s fifth novel, and I wonder if she would be marketed as a writer of young adult fiction if she were to begin her career today, when that category has finally been recognized for its literary merit and appeal, even to adult readers. She writes with an instinctive grasp of the adolescent point of view, in which concepts like personal freedom and self- determination have the highest emotional charge and adults are powerful but slightly irrelevant beings. Her most celebrated novel, A Complicated Kindness, is narrated by another Mennonite teenager, who also rejects her repressive heritage and is forced to live by her own considerable wits. Like Irma Voth, it’s a sly, humorous but still distressing evocation of a young Mennonite’s predicament, which is your standard small-town adolescent crisis magnified by a thousand — depression thick in the air, attempts to navigate any aspect of one’s life systematically quashed, shame heaped upon any nonconformist behavior."
— Maria Russo, The New York Times
Read more...

Get all of Miriam Toews's books here...