Post #7

As dense as Almanac is, there are some concrete details that I'm starting to hold on to. Mostly, there is the strong symbolism surrounding snakes and snake skins. It seems to be a prevalent theme throughout the book, and it all started with Sterling and the giant stone snake. Going along with the mystical nature of this novel, I began to view the snake as a bad omen, seeing as it caused a large amount of misfortune for Sterling. My ideas were bolstered when we read that Lecha can communicate with snakes, and that it doesn't always lead to good things. Still, I didn't feel completely sure of myself until we read about Mernardo. The connection between Alegria's snake skin shoes and purse and Mernardo's frequent dreams about snake skins gave me the feeling that something bad was about to happen. Sure enough, when they went dancing that one fateful night, it was the snake skin figures in his vest that lead to his ultimate demise.

Now, it could be argued that snakes are a form of power in this novel, because of their apparent control over the fate of the characters, but I still disagree. I have to go back to my intuition on this one; as soon as we read about the stone snake (near the beginning of the book), I was convinced that snakes were symbols of bad things to come. It's like getting that gut feeling that you can't explain, but that you trust anyway. Maybe it was supposed to be obvious that snakes were bad omens, or maybe they aren't supposed to be at all. Or maybe this book is just getting to me and I have no idea what I'm talking about. Still, I feel that this is one of the few things that I've been able to understand in Almanac, so I'm sticking to my theories.