sortilege

He chose her to play Sortilège, the movie’s narrator and the novel’s casually insightful mystic, because, he said, a narrator knows more than the characters.

Snowshoeing is a workout, but you’ll be rewarded with a stop in a rustic cabin for hot fondue spiked with Sortilège, a whiskey with maple syrup that adds a subtle sweetness.

Sortilège tells the story of Doc and Shasta from an unseen, undated, unspecified vantage point, even as, on a few occasions, she turns up within the story.

He gives Pynchon’s unnamed narrator an identity, taking a minor character, a woman named Sortilège, from a few scenes in the book, and making her the first person seen onscreen.

But it surely counts that the lone voice of wisdom belongs not to Doc, but to his friend and the film’s narrator, Sortilège, played by the cotton-voiced Joanna Newsom.