Wow, what a week. There are a number of issues that pop up this time around, but I think that the Vesna situation kind of trumps everything. After the dance performance that Mirna and Yara orchestrate to visually interpret Mirna’s sexual experiences with the devil in all its permutations, Mirna gives Yarostan a slightly fuller description of the circumstances leading up to Vesna’s death. The tale so far is that she fell into a catatonic state, the doctors describing it as a brain injury and Yara calling it a game gone wrong. Before Mirna’s full confession in Yarostan’s 8th letter, the impression had been that perhaps this had something to do with Yara catching Vesna kissing herself in the mirror and suggesting that their father would kiss her when he returned from jail.

In this letter, Mirna divulges that Vesna had caught her and Yara in the middle of their “love games” and was disgusted. To “free” her from her puritanical views, they pulled her into bed and began trying to have sex with her. She froze up into shock, which is not unheard of when people are being assaulted. She snapped out of the shock only to fight her way into her grandmother’s room and then resume a catatonic state. So, as far as Mirna and Yara are concerned, Vesna was killed because the sex-negative morals imposed on her by her religious grandmother disabled her from expressing her true sexual desires. Mirna comes to conclude that it’s not demonic passion that causes destruction: “It’s only those who deny the devil who carry a sword!”

It seems that on the one side, there’s Mirna and Yara (and probably very, very few readers) who see puritanism and the medical establishment as the things that killed Vesna, and on the majority side there’s the belief that incest is wrong and that Vesna was right in opposing it. I like to think that maybe I have a third road here – and I hate the notion of the middle road, ugh – that while sex-negativity does cripple almost all of us into beings who don’t explore the full extent of our sexualities, non-consensual advances don’t help. It’s like forcing people to be free. I believe that Vesna typifies the person who simply is put through too much in a short period of time and has few resources at her disposal. She played what may have been her only card – insanity – and it proved fatal.

Yarostan gains a great deal of insight in this letter, about his family as well as the strikes going on in his country. He tells Sophia about his friends traveling to nearby factories to talk to the workers there and dreams about someday seeing Sophia in person. He tells her he loves her, and I get all warm every time I read it.

* * * * * * * * *

Sophia’s letter is chock-full of plot development, although more exciting than that sounds. Both the university occupations and factory strikes in her city are more or less ground to a halt. Luisa and Sophia are both arrested and ironically both accept string-pulling for early release again. Sophia enrolls in school to finish her bachelor’s degree, and she and Daman become friends again. Although his politics are often reprehensible to her, Sophia starts to notice that despite everything Daman is a very forgiving person and a good friend. Whenever she is in trouble, she can always count on him, no matter which of her relatives has yelled at him most recently. I can identify with that priority – choosing friends based on who is more thoughtful rather than who has the better politics.

Sabina is the real star of this letter though, and takes up much of Sophia’s 8th letter with her narratives and explanations. She describes more fully her first relationships at the carton factory, how she egged on Vera until it became clear that Vera wanted to ravage her sexually, how Yarostan was potentially more influential than he gave himself credit, and how she first engaged with Jan and Mirna. Sabina describes their romantic relationships as such: Sabina seduced Jan by asking him to pretend to be Mirna, and Mirna in turn seduced Sabina by assuming the role of Jan and asking Sabina to act as Mirna. It’s like a sexy teenage soap opera, with an eleven-year-old playing a surprisingly active role.

Sabina also reveals details about their emigration decades before. She and George Alberts had planned to emigrate even before the strikes began; Jan knew about it and assumingly Luisa also knew. She insists that Titus had only been imprisoned for a day and that he was present when they emigrated. She recounts a deeper history of the garage project both before Sophia arrived and the brief demise after she left. She addresses Yarostan’s questions about the role of technology in revolution by examining very deep beliefs she has held dearly throughout her entire life.

The part that I find most engaging about Sabina’s accounts is where signs of self-reflection become visible in her ever-confident exterior. Being Sophia-identified, it has always been easy for me to mark Sabina as the person I wanted to be: free-loving, self-assured, fierce. The first time I read this book I had started to feel pretty down on myself by this point because I identified with Sophia so much and felt so bad about it. When it comes out that even the great Sabina admires something about Sophia and values her, it’s like the validation that I have been looking for, which I realize is ridiculous – gaining assurance because one character in a novel validates another.

The Sophia we see in the novel is the Sophia as she writes about herself. We see the weak sides of her because she shows them to us, because they’re the sides that she sees in herself. Whenever I read this book and Sabina tells Sophia how much she appreciates Sophia’s self-reflection, I realize that even we truly flawed individuals have something to offer.