This is a spectacular book about the Middle Ages and the Crusades, and love denied and the Lusignan family of Poitiers and their resident fairy, Melusine. She appears, even now, on the carvings on the Chateau (and she tells how she transported the stones to build it, being a fairy and all). Mujica Lainez breathes beautiful life into her story and into the world she inhabited, down to her vengeful mother and conniving sisters, and brings the time period to life.

The story then continues through the Crusades and the fight for Jerusalem through one of her descendants with whom she falls desperately in love centuries later. All of the panorama of knights on horseback, chivalry, hermits, living conditions, and lives filled with regret are covered here through Melusine's voice. It is eloquent, funny, biting, and insightful, especially as she is "writing" in modern times and has gained insight into her story through reading Proust and Freud.

What gave this story a lower star rating than I would have hoped is the amount of detail Mujica Lainez gets bogged down in place of Story. I know he did his research and was quite the scholar. But we do not need every single rippling of cloth to know that it was multi-hued. Or every single battle in the Crusades during the fall of Jerusalem. Or the list of cloth in the tapestries that were destroyed by soldiers. Those parts, while lovely and well-researched, seemed more a self-accolade about the research he had done and an author in need of reinforcement of his prowess.. And the ending seemed too contrived and sudden and with little invested in Melusine's story into the Now. ( )

I'd seen this book highly recommended for fans of Tolkien, so I picked
it up. I'm not sure where that recommendation came from, because I
didn't see any similarity in the writing style or themes. The writing
style was particularly stilted; perhaps because it was translated from
the Spanish, but I didn't find it particularly enjoyable.

Inspired by mythology, but without a 'mythic' feel to the story, the
book briefly outlines the story of the fairy Melusine,who took human
form to love a man, but was cursed to be rejected when her lover came
upon her in her true, monstrous form, in her bath. The largest part
of the book follows the incorporeal spirit of Melusine as she follows
around a young knight in the Crusades, her descendant, that she is
obsessed with. Although at one point she tries to take human form to
be with him (it doesn't work out, as she ends up in a male body, and
the knight isn't gay), this places the bulk of the narrative at a
remove, actions being described by an intangible observer, which is
distancing. ( )

A fairy's tale - a tale of medieval political and social machinations through France to the Holy Land, as observed and related by a fairy princess who gets transformed several times in the course of events. An immortal being, she is telling the tale from the 20th century. Written in Spanish, 1965, translated into English in the 1980s. Very dense, slow read, less about plot than about character interactions. Lots of medieval history. ( )

The medieval myth of the pretty Melusine, seen by an Argentinian of French origin