Why a Booktrail?
A woman locked in an asylum starts to record her life…
The Green Crow
What you need to know before your trail
Institutionalized in an asylum, a woman with a record of hallucinations commits her life story to paper. She records, from the age of six, her earliest memories of a drunken and abusive father, the strange men her mother introduced to repair the family, the imaginary forest to which she would run for safety and, of course, the enormous talking green crow who appeared when she most needed him. The green crow is a conceited, boisterous creature who follows the novel’s nameless protagonist throughout her life, until the day that the crow’s presence begins to embarrass her. Confined to a tedious domestic life, she is desperate to hide the crow’s very existence. Failing to do so, she winds up in a psychiatric hospital. Can she repress and renounce her acerbic, sharp-beaked daemon – or learn to love herself, bird and all?
Travel Guide
Latvia
A novel not with locations as such as many are inside the heads of those who inhabit the asylum – memories, stains and the reality of the asylum itself. However, the imaginary ‘Green Crow’ travels on a journey to Jurmala, a Latvian resort city on the Gulf of Riga known for wooden, art nouveau seaside villas, Soviet-era sanatoriums and long, sandy Jūrmala Beach.
The asylum is a stark,grim place:
Years are just numbers; the prison a room;the hospital a corridor with sun-filled squares. Numbers. A room. Squares. And life.
She likens the case of a fellow patient to that of the woman in Jane Eyre:
Fright (the nickname of a patient) is of the opinion that the old lady had been living locked up in the attic of some rich mansion.
“Like in Jane Eyre, have you read it? Now she is kept sedated – and tied to the bed too, just to be on the safe side
Riga
This is the city she remembers and thinks how she and her father walked around and explored. The city seeps into her asylum life:
“Bald round glasses like that poet of Riga street life, Aleksandres Caks. Ver much like Caks. “
the girl and her father visit St Peters church which has a “Mighty church tower -its spire topped by a golden cockerel -rises above the mosaic of pastel-coloured walls.”
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Green Crow
Destination : Latvia, Riga Author/Guide: Kristine Ulberga
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