Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

 

C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is his last and his best novel, my favorite of his more than 40 books. (I have read all the books published in his lifetime and many of the posthumous publications.) 

It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche transformed into a meditation on love, faith, and the blindness induced by our beliefs. It is a book that resists easy categorization: part myth, part psychological drama, part spiritual journey. More than any of his earlier fiction, it exposes how perception shapes reality and how love, when mixed with possessiveness, can turn divine beauty into human pain.

The novel’s narrator, Orual, is the older sister of Psyche, the princess whose beauty captivates their small, barbaric kingdom of Glome. Orual is plain, intelligent, brave, and fiercely loyal. She raises Psyche after their mother’s death and comes to love her with an intensity that borders on worship. When plague and famine strike the kingdom, the priest of Ungit declares that Psyche must be sacrificed to appease the goddess Ungit. Psyche is left on the Grey Mountain as a bride for the god of the West Wind. Orual’s world shatters.

From this point, the novel divides into two overlapping realities. Psyche, when Orual finds her again on the mountain, claims she is living in joy — rescued by a god who has taken her to a beautiful palace invisible to mortal eyes. She is radiant, serene, and transformed. Orual, however, sees only a desolate hillside and Psyche standing among the rocks and rain. To her, Psyche’s vision is madness born of trauma and loneliness. 

The mountain scene is the central confrontation of the book and one of the most haunting moments in twentieth-century fiction. Two sisters stand side by side, both utterly sincere, both certain of what they see — and both right in a sense. Lewis captures the agony of divided perception: one person living in a reality of faith, the other trapped in the limits of sight. 

When Psyche refuses to leave her invisible palace, Orual demands proof. She begs Psyche to disobey the god’s command and look upon him with a lamp while he sleeps. It is an act born of love but twisted by pride and fear. When Psyche does as her sister insists, the god’s wrath drives her into exile. Orual, realizing too late what she has done, spends the rest of her life haunted by guilt. “I did not know how I hated the gods,” she writes later. “I was their enemy for having loved too much.”

The second half of the novel follows Orual’s reign as Queen of Glome. She becomes a capable and just ruler, a woman who hides her face behind a veil and her heart behind the duties of power. Her wisdom and strength as a monarch contrasts sharply with her spiritual weakness as one who cannot forgive herself. Lewis shows her crown as both salvation and disguise: she fights for her kingdom with courage but never escapes the inner war with the gods. The political battles of her reign, defending Glome’s independence, administering justice, commanding loyalty, mirror her spiritual struggle for meaning. She wields authority outwardly while inwardly living in rebellion against divine authority.

What makes Till We Have Faces extraordinary is its moral and emotional honesty. Lewis does not offer easy redemption. Orual’s eventual vision — her final confrontation with the gods in a kind of dream-trial — reveals that her “complaint against the gods” was really a complaint against love itself. She wanted Psyche for her own; she could not bear a love that transcended her control. Only in the end, when her face is finally “given back” to her, when she sees herself truly, does she glimpse the divine beauty Psyche had seen all along. “How can they meet us face to face,” she asks, “till we have faces?”

Lewis’s prose in this novel is spare, rhythmic, and powerful. There is little of Narnia’s mythic brightness here; instead, he writes with the gravity of Greek tragedy. The landscape of Glome is as harsh and real as the human soul it represents. Every image — the mountain, the river, the dark temple of Ungit — serves as both physical place and psychological symbol.

Till We Have Faces a story of perception. The same scene on the mountain is heaven or rubble depending on the eyes that behold it. Psyche’s faith allows her to see the palace of the gods; Orual’s reason and jealousy reduce it to stone and mud. Between those two visions lies the entire struggle of belief. By the end, Orual’s reign, her power, her intelligence, and her love are all stripped bare until only one question remains: can the human heart bear to see truly?

In its depth and ambiguity, Till We Have Faces stands as Lewis’s best mature work in a widely varied corpus of brilliant books. It is a myth retold that is etched into my understanding of the world.  

The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel

 

In The Elements of Marie Curie, Dava Sobel presents the life of one of the most compelling figures in the history of science. Marie Curie combined relentless curiosity, monumental discovery, and personal sacrifice in a life marked by deep sadness. This book is a brilliant portrait of a scientist whose work fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the physical world whose story still inspires more than a century later.

At first glance, Marie Curie’s life might seem like well-trodden territory. She is one of the most famous scientists of all time — the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only person to win two Nobels in two different sciences (physics and chemistry), and a pioneer whose research on radioactivity altered the course of modern physics and medicine. 

Sobel’s approach is not that of a biographer merely listing accomplishments. Instead, she focuses on the elements — literal and metaphorical — that defined Curie’s life and character: her scientific discoveries, her intellectual resilience, her personal losses, and the historical forces that shaped her path.

Sobel’s narrative opens with Curie’s early life as Maria Skłodowska in Russian-occupied Warsaw, a childhood marked by both hardship and defiance. Her determination to pursue education — in an era and a country where women were excluded from universities — set the tone for the rest of her life. Sobel excels at highlighting the decisions that propelled Curie forward: her clandestine schooling in Poland’s “Flying University,” her move to Paris to attend the Sorbonne, and the single-minded focus that carried her through poverty and isolation to academic success.

The heart of the book, of course, is Curie’s collaboration with her husband, Pierre, and their groundbreaking work on radioactivity. Sobel recreates the grim physical conditions of their laboratory — damp, unheated, and barely adequate — as they processed tons of pitchblende in search of new elements. From this laborious, back-breaking work came polonium and radium, discoveries that transformed physics and chemistry and ushered in a new understanding of atomic structure. Sobel’s descriptions of their scientific process are clear and engaging, balancing technical accuracy with narrative flow.

But The Elements of Marie Curie is not just about scientific triumph. Sobel also delves into the intense personal cost of Curie’s work. Pierre’s sudden death in 1906 left Marie a widow with two young daughters and a research program to sustain. Rather than retreat, she stepped into his professorship at the Sorbonne, becoming the university’s first female professor, and carried on their work alone. Sobel portrays this period with particular sensitivity, capturing both Curie’s grief and her resolve. Sobel shows Curie not as a mythic icon, but as a human being, enduring profound loss while pursuing the deepest questions of nature.

The book also explores Curie’s fraught relationship with fame and recognition. Sobel presents the sexism and xenophobia that dogged Curie throughout her career. She recounts the vicious press campaigns that followed her affair with fellow physicist Paul Langevin, the scandals that nearly derailed her career and overshadowed her second Nobel Prize. Yet even in the face of public humiliation, Curie refused to compromise her dedication to science in circumstances that would have crushed most people.

Sobel is particularly vivid on Curie’s war year, later years, and legacy. During World War I, she personally outfitted and drove mobile X-ray units to the front, saving countless lives and advancing medical technology. She also trained a generation of scientists: including her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize herself. Marie and Irene are the only mother and daughter to win the Nobel Prize.  (Six father-son pairs have earned the Nobel Prize, most famously William Henry Bragg (father) and William Lawrence Bragg (son) who won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics together.)

What makes The Elements of Marie Curie stand out is its balance of science and storytelling. Sobel writes with clarity and elegance, never oversimplifying Curie’s work but always anchoring it in the human experience behind the science. The book is as much about persistence, courage, and identity as it is about radiation and elements. By the final pages, readers feel they know not only what Marie Curie discovered, but who she was in all of her complexity: a scientist, a mother, a widow, a patriot, and a pioneer. As Sobel said, “A scientist in the laboratory is not only a technician, but also a child confronted by natural phenomena more enchanting than any fairy tale.”

The Elements of Marie Curie is both a thorough introduction for those learning about Marie Curie for the first time and a portrait with a unique perspective for those already familiar with her legacy. Sobel weaves the story of the discovery of the structure of the atom into her narrative of Curie's life, which show just how rapidly the understanding of the atom and matter changed during Curie's lifetime, propelled in part by her discoveries.

On mark of Marie Curie's stature in the science community is that she was the only woman to attend all of the Solvay Conferences from their inception in 1911 to the conference in 1933 the year before her death.  In fact, only Paul Langevin also attended all of the conferences.  Other attendees included de Broglie, Einstein, Planck, Rutheford and other luminaries in the world of physics. Curie said of the conferences, “I take such great pleasure in speaking of new things with all these lovers of physics.” 

I loved the book. I have read several accounts of Marie Curie's life including a middle-school level biography in French. Each time I read about Curie I learn something new about her life. With Sobel's book, I felt most vividly how Marie Curie's life influenced the times she lived through.