Background of the Study
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the publication year, this novel is still considered fresh. The type of this novel is Portuguese fiction. Here is the brief summary of the novel:
This novel consists of people’s point of view about the main characters so the writer told the summary in general. The novel begins with Athena’s dead. Her real
name was Sherine Khalil. In the novel she was usually called Athena. She is the main character of the novel. She was an adopted child. She was abandoned by her gipsy
mother in Transylvania, Romania. She was taken by her adoptive parents to Beirut. They moved to London, where Athena continued her education until university.
There she met a man that later became her husband. She then got divorced and lived with her son. Her last job known was a real-estate agent in Dubai. She learned
calligraphy from a teacher in a desert. She also went back to Transylvania to find her birth mother. Her life was never flat. Later on, many people accused her as a witch. In
the end, she was murdered—or at least that is what people were thinking. Mostly, the points of view that create the story come from the people who knew her: her adoptive
mother, her ex-husband, a journalist, a priest, her landlord, her calligraphy teacher, and an actress. As we see in the brief summary, Athena as the main character of the
novel always seeks for something in her life. Having read this novel, the writer found that the portrayals of Athena in the novel
are interesting, especially her portrayal as a witch. The way the story was told is unique. The story of Athena’s life was told from many different perspectives. The
writer found out that it is interesting to analyze Athena’s struggles. She had an
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extraordinary life. This study has its purpose to discover the meaning of Athena’s life.