week of 4/3/02
 
 
 

Goodman’s plot focuses on Latin’s return to mainstream
By Jeff Minick
The Lake Of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman.
Ballentine Books, 2002. $23.95 — 368 pp.

Salve, Carol Goodman!

I wanted te to know that I have just completus your librum, The Lake Of Dead Languages. If reviews could be hugs and osculi, femina carissima, I want te to know that I would tenet te in my arms and give you a maxissimum.hug. Not only have you written a wonderful librum, but you’ve written it about a Latin teacher, a magistra Latinae.

The story behind your liber is very dark and Gothicus. Jane Hudson returns to the Heart Lake School for Girls, a schola where she studied Latina 20 years before. We quickly learn that her duo best amicae, Lucy and Deirdre, along with Lucy’s frater Matt, committed suicide in the lake when they were all discipulae in the schola. Separated and contemplating divorce from her vir, Jane has returned now to the schola as a magistra both because she needs the laborem and because she feels compelled to face the ghosts that have haunted her all these anni.

The fabula quickly thickens when pagina of Jane’s old journal, missing these 20 anni, begin reappearing. Other events — threats against Jane’s daughter, signa from the past, and another mors by suicide — hasten Jane’s iter into the past, where she is confronted not only by the ghosts of her dreams, but by the bloody events of the present. Someone is reenacting Jane’s past, creating step by step the same patterns of suicide, mystery, and swirling emotions. Like one of those tragic figures in a Greek drama, Jane discovers that the past, like her present, was not as it appeared.

To narrare too much here would be to give away too much of this dark, haunted fabula for my readers, but let me dicit again that the fabula is fabulous except for the finis. You didn’t need all those rushed revelations at the end of the fabula, Magistra Carol. No reader would care about the last will et testimentum of the founder of the school. The ending seems contrived as a result of that testimentum, and I guessed the nomen of the murderer halfway through the liber.

That said, let me offer my gratias tibi for this book. Primus, tu scribes wonderfully. Your prose style is wonderfully lucid, clarus et durus as a diamond. I suspect that your major in Latina at Vasser and your anni of leaching Latina to discipuli in Austin, Texas, helped develop your potentissima style of writing. Your crisp prose should bring happiness to readers everywhere.

Your descriptiones of young ferninae and of scholae privatae are right on the pecuma. You have really captured what it is to be a teen today; to be stuck between adolescentiae and adulthood, to be struggling to grow up. You have also done a fine job of showing both the benefits and the drawbacks of an exclusive private education.

Yodve also written about a magistra Latinae. To feature a magistra Latina as the main character of the librum, is wonderful; to actually include so much classical learning with that magistra Latina is the altissima pars of cool. Yodve put in multi things in your fiber that will teach populi about the natura et meaning of a classical education — its value, its demands, its excitement intellectually (Some readers may be distressed by the May Day rites, I suppose, but impressionable adulescentes might try this reversion to pagan practices, and certainly all involved paid the consequences).

By nunc, Carol Goodman, you can spectare that I love Latina. I myself am a parttime magister Latinae. Though I lack your classical background, being more of a hamand-egger Latin magister, I nonetheless love Latina and am felix to see lingua Latina making a sort of comeback nowadays. Although I bet that schola in Austin missed you when you left, you have done both Latina et literatura a great service with your liber.

May The Lake Of Dead Languages find many readers and may you write many more libros as fine as this one.

Vale, Carol Goodman, et Deus tecum!

An admiring reader and amator Latmae

N.B. Grammatica in his litteris est simplissimus.

(Jeff Minick can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)