“Sing, Muse, he sings, and the edge in his voice makes it clear that this is not a request.”
I tend to shy away from modern retellings of fairy tales for reasons I’ve discussed in other reviews, but I really enjoy retellings of myths (though I like the straight retellings of them within their own context more than modern renderings of them in contemporary contexts). The difference I think is that I took a class in college reading myth as literature, and even though in a lot of ways fairy tales are no different (and I love the Grimms for example), what I usually felt about myths is that the stories I knew of them never told me enough, while I generally felt more satisfied with the fairy tales in their telling. It might also be a case of fairy tales tending to be relatively contemporary in the versions I read (Grimms are only 200 years old), versus myths that for me either came in forms too heady for a kid in their original versions or watered down in retellings by contemporary atuhors, so I wanted a more fully realized version of everything.
This novel is from Natalie Haynes, who I read and reviewed a little while ago for her nonfiction book Pandora’s Jar which discusses the different portrayals of various women in Greek writing, and what those portrayals tell us and don’t. This novel is one of her own attempts to do the same, and the form here is fairly similar to that book, but fictionally. Each chapter here takes on a story from one of the women we find within the Iliad and the Odyssey (and I think maybe a tiny moment of the Aeneid). Most of the stories are told in the third person like a lot of myths are, but the very best sections are the passages narrated by Penelope, wife of Odysseus, through letters to her absent husband and even prayers. One of the single best chapters is the section in which Paris must decide who among Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena gets the Golden Apple. They act like rich assholes, while he acts like a horny child, and the whole scene is really funny. Most of the rest of the sections are told in smaller stories from characters like Hecube, Thetis, Iphigenia, and various groups of women that sometimes gets spokesperson and sometimes don’t. The result is a mosaic of voices and stories that circulate in various ways around the two epics, but is not otherwise a retelling of the story so much as filling in the gaps with the voices we lost from the originals.
