{review} joanna & ulysses

May Sarton Joanna and Ulysses (1963)

Not look back. For a month she was to give herself to joy, to paint, to think, to feel youth, buried so long, rising up in her like sap into the branches of a battered tree.

I think I cried almost all the way through this novella. It is beautiful - writing, themes, donkeys, everything. Joanna is a thirty year old Athenian. She has been looking after her father since she was fifteen - since that day her mother died during the German occupation of Greece, in circumstances which devastated the family. 

Joanna dreams of becoming an artist and snatches at a chance for a month to herself on the beautiful island of Santorini. She will paint and eat and sleep and discover a 'renascent self': "somewhere deep down inside her there was a being who was not the dutiful daughter she had forced herself to become."

Santorini offers an escape and a chance to be selfish about her own needs. But Joanna does not factor in discovering Ulysses, an overworked and neglected donkey, who will transform her life. This all sounds a bit Eat, Bray, Love, doesn't it? It is hard to say why it isn't, but it really is one of the most sad, lovely books I have read this year and I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

The young man slouched toward her, and spoke in an angry, whining singsong, "He might last to the top," he said, "We'll work him till he drops, and that's that. Do you think we are rich?" He spat again, "We can't afford to keep a sick animal. If he dies, all right, kaput!"

Joanna flinched before the German word. The memories of cruelty and violence swept over her, cruelty about which one could do nothing; she experienced again the corroding poison of helplessness before violence. She felt suddenly weak, as weak as the donkey. The donkey had no strength, it seemed, even to wag its tail at the flies. It waited, just barely able to stand, its head drooping a little. The patience and suffering of the donkey were awful.    

It is also SO nice to read a book where a spinster makes it to the end and things turn out happily!

If you liked this... This is the first May Sarton book that I have read, but it won't be the last by any means.

{review} the song of achilles

Madeline Miller The Song of Achilles (2011) 

 

I turned. Thetis stood at the edge of the clearing, her bone-white skin and black hair bright as slashes of lightning. The dress she wore clung close to her body and shimmered like fish-scale. My breath died in my throat. ‘You were not to be here,’ she said. The scrape of jagged rocks against a ship’s hull. She stepped forward, and the grass seemed to wilt beneath her feet. She was a sea-nymph, and the things of earth did not love her.

Madeline Miller has produced a remarkable redaction of the story of the Greek hero Achilles - the 'best of the Achaians' [Greeks] of the Trojan War. Miller has a real feel for the stories behind the Trojan War saga, not least The Iliad. The result is a very much humanized presentation of the great hero, told from the perspective of his lover Patroclus.  

The Iliad is a hard read. It helps to like men and battles. It is a wonderful poem if you can stay the distance. Miller's great achievement is to take this material and rework it into something that makes one want to return to the original - she reminds the reader of how extraordinary are these stories.

The plot: Miller's narrator Patroclus (yes, it's first person) tells the story of how he met Achilles, their boyhood, adolescence, increasing sexual attraction, and their attempts to avoid Achilles' known fate: 

My hand closed over his. ‘You must not kill Hector,’ I said. He looked up, his beautiful face framed by the gold of his hair. ‘My mother told you the rest of the prophecy.’ ‘She did.’ ‘And you think that no one but me can kill Hector.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And you think to steal time from the Fates?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Ah.’ A sly smile spread across his face; he had always loved defiance. ‘Well, why should I kill him? He’s done nothing to me.’ For the first time then, I felt a kind of hope.

Some characters really shone for me: Miller's Odysseus is wonderfully tricky - as he should be. Miller's presentation of Achilles' mother, the goddess Thetis, manages to surmount the problems of realistically presenting gods in a human world.

 Some things didn't work so well for me: I thought Miller had some problems with time: after all, there is a lot of time to get through during the Trojan War when nothing much is happening except battle, battle, battle. The segues from stasis to action seemed sometimes forced. I also found the love scenes a bit coyly soft focus; indeed, on one level, the whole book sometimes threatens to veer into 'romance' territory.

I handed him the last piece, his helmet, bristling with horsehair, and watched as he fitted it over his ears, leaving only a thin strip of his face open. He leaned towards me, framed by bronze, smelling of sweat and leather and metal. I closed my eyes, felt his lips on mine, the only part of him still soft. Then he was gone.

But, you know, I really enjoyed The Song of Achilles. I enjoyed Miller's take on the Patroclus-Achilles relationship (were they? weren't they? was always an issue in studying The Iliad and works of the epic cycle). I think it is fantastic that a book that is in its own way a love song to a far more ancient book is a contender for the Orange Prize and I think that Miller has done classical studies the sort of huge popularizing favour that ordinarily only comes about nowadays via the cinema - Gladiator et al.

‘Is it right that my father’s fame should be diminished? Tainted by a commoner?’
‘Patroclus was no commoner. He was born a prince, and exiled. He served bravely in our army, and many men admired him. He killed Sarpedon, second only to Hector.’
‘In my father’s armour. With my father’s fame. He has none of his own.’
Odysseus inclines his head. ‘True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another.’ He spread his broad hands. ‘We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?’ He smiles. ‘Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.’
‘I doubt it.’

Rating: 8/10.

If you liked these: go on, read the original.

{review} touch not the cat

Mary Stewart Touch Not The Cat (1976)

I saw the tiny smile at the corners of Rob’s mouth again, and thought suddenly, ‘My God, I’ve married him. Rob Granger, the garden-boy.’ The mixture of strangeness, tenderness, and sheer sexual excitement took away the power of coherent thought and struck me silent.

I think when we look back we will say, "Oh September and October 2011, that was when we were ALL reading Mary Stewart." I'm thoroughly enjoying the Mary Stewart revival which is keeping me away from the heavier and more sober things I have on the TBR. So far I've read:

[I would just like to say that I HATE THESE COVERS but they represent the editions I read. Touch Not The Cat, for instance, is set in the 1970s but you'd never pick it from its 1950s' milkmaidish cover]

This Rough Magic (1964): sparkling romance with a not too arduous mystery, set on beautiful Corfu with much interweaving from The Tempest.  

My Brother Michael (1959): sparkling romance with a not too arduous mystery, set in beautiful Delphi with much interweaving from The Oresteia.

The Moonspinners (1962): sparking romance with not too arduous mystery, set on beautiful Crete with much interweaving of Greek folk-tale.

Madam, Will You Talk (1955): sparkling romance with a not too arduous mystery, set amid the beautiful Roman remains in the South of France, with much interweaving from (?) old French troubadour lyric.

Nine Coaches Waiting (1958): a bit darker on the romance and the mystery front - a touch of gothic - for which I blame the less sunny setting of a chateau in the gloomy Savoy. An orphan/Cinderella story. Oh, yes, interweavings of Jacobean revenge drama with Macbeth and a sprinkling of Paradise Lost. I've never been wildly keen on the Jacobeans, sorry Ben Jonson, and this book was a bit overwrought and long for what it was.

Thunder on the Right (1957): sparkling romance with a good deal of pent up sexual frustration from wannabe nuns with flashing dark Spanish eyes, and many others, with a dead obvious mystery, set amid the beautiful Pyrenées, with much interweaving of classical music vocab.

It's not difficult to pick Stewart's successful formula: in a gorgeous warm European holiday setting, a lovely young woman of uncompromising virtue, stubborness and impetuosity - with instant recall of any Shakespearean/classical/medieval French poetic literary allusion - encounters a cultured but manly man of action (despite being musical) with uncanny ability to finish all her quotations. The baddies get what's coming, the goodies triumph, a child is generally rescued, a lot of the heroine's clothes are reduced to becoming linen rags in raging torrents and we all get a crash course in figuring out all those half-remembered bits of school Shakespeare. Everyone drinks a tremendous number of aperitifs and smokes like a chimney. The meals are extraordinary and I spend my reading time dreaming about food. I don't think these are great books, by any means, but they are so, so satisfying and the heroines are, in general, smart and accomplished and not prone to too much unnecessary screaming. The plots are, I confess, flimsy.

 

The six titles above were all deliberate selections based on where they were set: Greece and France (particularly southern France). These are settings which I particularly enjoy in any book, but find 100% magical in this genre ('romantic suspense'?). 

Touch Not the Cat was selected purely for its title. I had a cat like that. His name was Bertie. But to the book: this was a slightly odd one especially if you're not keen on semi-magical themes. There's a romantic setting (ruined old castle in the Malvern hills) for a romantic heroine, orphaned under mysterious circumstances and surrounded by male cousins who look identical and who may not have her best interests at heart. This is complicated further by the heroine's inheritance of a kind of telepathic connection to someone whom she suspects must be one of the cousins, and whom she believes is her One True Love. But which man...? [I just find cousins as romantic partners rather icky, myself]. Mazes, dodgy weirs, disappearing Tang dynasty ceramics, louche young American women in trousers, and a host of problems for star-cross'd lovers (yes, this is a heavy-quotation-from-Romeo and Juliet book). The class issues have dated badly (which is good, I guess).

In sum: I'm enjoying Mary Stewart. The writing is excellent and there are lovely turns of phrase (e.g., the heroine who "nibbled the bitter crusts of commonsense"!) and plenty of vocab broadeners (telephones 'thresh', 'pleached' trees are 'pollarded', etc.). I think I prefer the earlier 1950s' ones. Her ability to combine mystery and romance reminds me of Helen MacInnes, but I think Helen MacInnes does it better in the meatier plot line. How about a reissue of Helen MacInnes' oeuvre?

{weekend words}

‘I wasn’t furious,’ said Godfrey, and smiled. Then he turned me round and kissed me. Well, I had asked for it, and now I was getting it. I shut my eyes. If I pretended it was Max … no, that wasn’t possible. Well, then, someone who didn’t matter – for instance that rather nice boy I’d once had an abortive affair with but hadn’t cared about when it came to the push … But that wouldn’t work either. Whatever Godfrey was or wasn’t, he didn’t kiss like a rather nice boy … I opened my eyes and watched, over his shoulder, the lovely, heavy lamp swinging about a foot away from his head. If I could manoeuvre him into its orbit … I supposed there were circumstances in which it was correct, even praiseworthy, for a girl to bash a man’s head in with a lamp while he was kissing her…

Mary Stewart (1964)

This Rough Magic

{review} the messenger of athens

Anne Zouroudi The Messenger of Athens (2007)

I thought that this book - the first in 'The Greek Detective' series by Anne Zouroudi - was excellent. It has everything: a gruesome crime, a grave injustice, a corrupt police-force, an atmospheric Greek island background, a quirky hero and a touch of divine intervention. 

Hermes Diaktoros, literally 'Hermes Messenger' arrives on the Greek island of 'Thiminos' to investigate the death of a young Greek woman who may or may not have committed suicide. The island - dependent as so many are on summer trade and the fishing which can only take place when the weather permits - is a gloomy, dirty, depressing; a very satisfyingly realistic location rather than the idyllic Greek islands of summer tourism. The men of the island are the worst type of misogynists and the women are not much better. The dead woman is suspected to have strayed from the marital bed - the most shaming crime - and no one is interested in raking up what really happened.

Enter Hermes Diaktoros, the 'fat man': impeccably groomed and besuited, apart from his eccentric choice of white tennis shoes; light on his feet despite his size. I loved how the narrative played with the question of Hermes' identity: is he a policeman, a private detective, someone with a private interest in justice? Or is he a relic from the past, literally Hermes the Messenger of the ancient Greek gods, sent to uncover the truth, to right wrongs and administer justice? I guess it would have been too O.T.T. to have him wear Nikes.

It is a fascinating concept and really well done and I can't wait to read the next one in the series.

Rating: 9/10

If you liked this... it'd have to be something with an all-seeing, all-knowing hero who makes the reader join the dots. In an exotic location. And a narrative which cuts between present and past.