Book Review: The Palace of Eros, by Caro de Robertis

On making Mount Olympus' foundations shake

I first discovered the work of Caro de Robertis (they/them) with their novel The Gods of Tango, which follows an immigrant from Italy’s new life in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century, embracing that quintessential Argentinean dance and music, and transitioning gender in the process; I was interested because I am an amateur ballroom dancer and can dance the American bastardization of Tango reasonably well, but know vanishingly little of the original. Since then, I have read some of their other books, including Cantoras, a spellbinding, heartbreaking saga of lesbian life under the dictatorship in Uruguay, and The President and the Frog, an odd little novel that dips into the supernatural. But in their most recent novel they take the speculative plunge: The Palace of Eros could be considered another entry in the recent subgenre of feminist retellings of ancient myth (as my esteemed colleague on this blog Roseanna Pendlebury has deftly discussed the failings of said subgenre).

Unlike Pendlebury, I will admit to you that I am not the ideal audience for this novel, and in all likelihood not the ideal audience for de Robertis’ oeuvre in general. I am heterosexual, cisgender, and male, ethnically mixed between a smorgasbord of western Europe on the one hand and the Philippines on the other. I am autistic, with no romantic relationships in my life thus far. I have no cultural link with Latin America, but I speak Spanish reasonably well if not fluently. Nor am I particularly fluent in classical mythology. A more narrow-minded person may ask why I would read this book to begin with. I would first retort with the well-trod benefits of reading widely, of learning other perspectives, of opening your mind. I would then provide this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth:

“Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.”

The novel is a queer reinterpretation of the story of Psyche and Eros. In this novel, the former is the youngest of three daughters of a farmer. She is said to be the most beautiful, and her father is intent on using that fact to marry her off to a man that could benefit him. She and her sisters are made to sit quietly in their living room as her father socializes with the men of her town. Later, she is displayed as a sculpture would be at an auction, gawked at, leered at, but never actually engaged with in any substantive form. She is objectified in the sense that she is reduced to the status of an object to be traded away, as something to be hopefully received by the suitors, and to be traded away for benefit by her father.

It is at this juncture that Aphrodite, goddess of love, takes note, and is disgusted that men find Psyche more beautiful than her. She sends her child, Eros, to make her fall in love with a monster. Note how I said ‘child,’ and not ‘son,’ as Eros is traditionally male in mythology. Here, Eros presents femme in most contexts but can shapeshift across the gender binary (including sex organs). Though a character whose gender expression is quite fluid, Eros is referred to with she/her pronouns throughout the novel, and that is what I will use here. She is an embodiment of sexual desire, as in classical mythology, but a more expansive, more liberatory, queerer form; she loves both men and women (expressing confusion when contemplating why her mother has only ever had sex with men). More piercingly, she asks why her crossing of the gender binary is so rankling to the other gods, as they change species with regularity. If a man can become a god, and a god can become a swan, surely a man can become a woman, and a woman become a man, so the logic goes, and it is a hard logic to argue with.

Much as in the original myths, Eros arranges to whisk Psyche away to a pleasant valley with an opulent palace filled with luxuries. There are sumptuous meals that are refilled every day, and supplies for art, and baths, and a very big bed. Every night, when Psyche goes to sleep, she is joined in the dark by a person she at first calls, for lack of a better term, her ‘husband,’ who makes her swear to never bring light into the room, leaving ‘him’ anonymous, and to never ask who ‘he’ is. The ‘husband’ is of course Eros, hiding her transgressions against the Olympian patriarchal order by roof and by anonymity. The two will only meet in the marriage bed, in pitch black. This raises two significant themes in the book.

Firstly: if the word ‘Eros’ appearing in the title wasn’t enough to clue you in, there is a lot of sex in this book. The lovemaking sessions between Eros and Psyche are emotionally tense and psychologically deep. Consider that Psyche’s sole exposure to any form of human sexuality beyond rumors of the mechanics involved in heterosexual intercourse is to be leered at as essentially a trophy, to later become the second-class partner in an unequal arrangement as she is ripped away from everything and everyone she loves (her sisters and her mother in particular) to be part of a man’s status game (there is very much a dynamic of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ evident in the way the menfolk of her town behave). It is here that she gets to experience sex as a joyful thing, as something that she can take pleasure in. Eros clearly cares for her needs, and knows how to keep things exciting (the ability to change between male and female forms is used to great effect here). This is a very strongly embodied liberation: liberation not as an abstract concept, but as a thing that exists physically, on the skin and in the nervous system. At first, this appears to be eroticism without the shackles of patriarchy, without the weight of societal expectations, without the status-jockeying and the need to marry a man simply to have basic human needs met. At first.

If all of the above raises some thorny issues of consent in your mind, you have struck on the second theme I was mentioning. Eros has effectively kidnapped Psyche and, without explanation, given her everything she could ever want. Eros resolutely refuses to give any actual identifying information about herself to Psyche, and has made it clear that this cornucopia of gifts will only continue if Psyche agrees to her demands. At first, Psyche is happy to accede due to the novelty of the whole thing, but as time goes on she begins to grow bored with not having any company, and insulted by a lack of explanation. Psyche eventually begins to probe the boundaries of what Eros has allowed and finds answers, to Eros’ great displeasure.

This is the sort of thing that, if left unexamined, would be disturbing, but de Robertis is brave enough to tackle this issue head on. Eros has designed this arrangement to accomplish a number of things: to rescue Psyche from Aphrodite’s wrath, to explore the erotic opportunities of freely transcending the gender binary, and to hide this threat to the Olympian patriarchal order from the eyes of Zeus. Eros is herself deeply traumatized from the way her gender non-conformity has been persecuted, and empathizes deeply with Psyche. But as those with relative privilege so often do to those with less privilege, Eros treats Psyche not as an equal, but as a charity case, to be manipulated and prodded in the service of the former’s sense of self-preservation. In this arrangement, what little agency Psyche has is at Eros’ allowance (and there is some agency; Psyche is thrilled by the ability to engage in artistic expression in the palace, as she takes up painting with gusto). She is not treated as deserving the dignity of a clear answer to what’s going on, the dignity of real consent. What becomes so crushingly clear is that, in her attempt to escape patriarchal norms, she has recreated them in this palace, in this valley, allegedly away from it all. The great tragedy of the bulk of the book is seeing this logic play out; Eros and Psyche both are getting a crash-course education in breaking patriarchal norms, but, as Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood,’” and that in face of education that is not liberatory, the oppressed will only seek to become the oppressor.

It is at this point I am going to spoil the ending because it is too rich in thematic content to leave unremarked upon. Those interested in the story should exercise caution.

Psyche ultimately storms out of the palace and tries to find her way home. Eros, distraught, is found out by the other Olympians and is now in deep trouble with them for breaking their rigid gender norms. More gods get involved, some of whom are on Psyche’s side, and eventually Psyche and Eros come to see each other again, Psyche having reclaimed a sense of dignity and Eros having reckoned fully with the implications of what she had done to Psyche. Eros asks Psyche if she wants to stay in the relationship, and after thinking about it, she says yes. Eros says she will find a way to marry Psyche, and turn her into a demigoddess. One way or another, she says, the Olympians will accept her, and this arrangement. The novel ends not long after.

This is an ending that feels narratively satisfying, but has implications that some may object to. One objection I consider is that this is an abuse victim choosing her abuser, and I was more than a little worried at first. But, thinking about it more thoroughly, I came around to the ending. The novel has made clear the nature of why Eros did what she did, not out of malice, but out of a limited imagination. I can see how Psyche herself could have come to that conclusion in regards to Eros, her mind being opened by her positive experiences within the palace - experiences which would lead her, later, to seeing the issues of the palace arrangement itself. She comes to understand how Eros came from a situation not unlike her own. She understands, then, how Eros came to act the way she did, and she can forgive. That’s what makes the most sense to me, anyway.

This ending, again, is narratively satisfying, but thinking about it more, I find that it has a lot of potentialities that are simply left alone. The idea of the Olympian gods having to recognize a same-sex marriage and a god/dess who jumps across the gender binary at will implies a titanic (no pun intended, but appreciated) shift in the cosmology of this version of Greece, and will doubtlessly resonate in the mortal realm. As an SFF reader and writer, and especially as an alternate history aficionado, I find that this is where de Robertis is most obviously a writer of literary fiction. I quote from a piece in Strange Horizons by Ada Palmer, which is my framework for this particular issue:

 “But one nearly-universal characteristic of contemporary mainstream literary fiction (as nearly-universal as technology is in SF or magic in fantasy) is a focus on a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world. It may be a journey of finding joy or finding despair, but the world is the challenge, and whether it's static or changing is despite the characters, not because of them. Lit fic thus does not teach any models of how the world changes or how history works, other than the powerlessness model of the individual being ground along by progress, like Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears of Modern Times. In fact, when literary authors want to talk about characters changing the world, they reach for the tools of SFF or historical fiction, as in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s Shikasta, Spufford’s Golden Hill, Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, and Mantel’s Wolf Hall—all of these authors established themselves first as mainstream authors but used genre tools when they wanted to address the genre question of how the world changes.”

The story of Psyche and Eros as presented by de Robertis matches this conception of literary fiction, albeit in a slanted form. Psyche, clearly, has no way of changing the brutal patriarchal order she had the misfortune of being born in. Eros, though, is a bit trickier - she has divine power, but she is presented for most of the novel as being incapable of changing the gendered order of Olympus. This is why this ending was a bit unsatisfying as a work of speculative fiction, whereas for a literary novel it is just fine. The part of me that loves SFF that depicts societies undergoing great change, whether sprawling (like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 - a book that was pivotal in my political development - or The Ministry for the Future, what Henry Farrell called the ‘apocalyptic systems thriller’) or smaller-scale, localized books like Sim Kern’s The Free People’s Village, found this to be a very abrupt sense of what the narrative’s sense of possibility - we’ve spent almost three hundred pages in a situation where the world must be endured, not changed, but now we have a way to potentially change it! That left me wanting more. Looking at this novel from an SFF perspective, Eros and Psyche are two characters who exemplify very well K. S. Villoso’s point about how worldbuilding and good characterization reinforce each other when writing speculative literature. De Robertis saw fit to let setting mold character, but not character to mold setting. I know literary authors aren’t usually in the habit of writing sequels in the way that SFF writers are, but I really, really wanted a sequel to this book where Eros and Psyche rip the ideological floorboards out from under Olympus and from classical Greece at large, and see what new world emerges.

I finished this book empathizing with Psyche’s desire for dignity, for personhood, as an autistic person of color aware that his government is targeting people like him. I do so, though, with the understanding that as a cisgender heterosexual man I am very much not the target audience, and that there are nuances to this story, and the way it is told, that I have simply missed. My privilege doubtlessly binds me to things here. I wondered for a while if I were the right person to review this book, being so far removed from the people it’s really about. I can say that it is an engaging, intelligent novel that I enjoyed a lot. I came to the conclusion that I, as someone with the privilege of having a platform like Nerds of a Feather, should use it to amplify good books that wouldn’t get coverage elsewhere in the SFF ecosystem. Ultimately, I believe that if this review brings this book to someone who will benefit from it on a level much deeper than I would, it is worth it.

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Reference: de Robertis, Caro. The Palace of Eros [Primero Sueño Press, 2024]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy