[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

I was immediately intrigued by the epigraphs for each chapter, some with attributions, most without, and decided to do some digging.

Here is a link to a lengthy discussion on Goodreads and here is a link to a more scholarly examination.

Thanks for those links. The very first epigraph is intense:

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, ‘mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o’er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.

It makes me think the book will be about vice and a gluttony of desire, and gives such a dark overcast to the proceedings.

Rarely does an opening epigraph produce any effect on my feeling of a novel going in. Usually epigraphs are so vague, broad or cryptic that they don’t make an impression on me at all, or at least until looking back after reading the book. Here though is one with real bite to it.