On Louise Glück’s 'Marigold and Rose'

Marigold and Rose is Louise Glück’s second book to appear since she won the Nobel Prize in October 2020 and her first to bear the designation ‘A Fiction’. Neither a novel nor a short story, it is identified in the publicity materials, plausibly enough, as a ‘fable’. That term has the advantage of having been favoured by Glück in the past: her Poems 1962–2012 contains five ‘Fables’ (not to mention an extensive set of ‘Parables’). Yet such poems are not ‘fables’ in the strict sense—that is, stories ‘in which animals substituted for people’, to adopt the description of the alphabet book that Marigold, one of the infant protagonists of Glück’s latest book, is spotted reading in its opening pages, and which her twin sister Rose, ‘a social being’, detests. Instead, Glück’s fables and parables are what we might call interpretive genres: short narratives, akin to dream, with an enigmatic significance. What then is the significance of Marigold and Rose?