Reading Wednesday
Dec. 28th, 2022 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxI think I'm at a point in my quest to read All The Women-Centric Trojan War (+ Adjacent) Retellings where it's a question of diminishing returns; Jennifer Saint's Elektra was also seriously disadvantaged by the fact I read it after Claire North's Ithaca, because not only did Saint's fall flat - she somehow managed to write a milquetoast retelling of the Oresteia?? - I had North's much more interesting interpretation of the same characters to compare it to. I think the biggest problem with Elektra was a failure to really commit to exploring such an inherently messed-up story. It's easy to cheer for Clytemnestra when she revenges herself upon the husband who killed their daughter, but less so when poor Cassandra, who has already been through so much, is caught in the crosshairs— and Saint decides to avoid such thorny questions of her audience's loyalty by writing Cassandra's death as a mercy killing that she herself requests, and Clytemnestra is reluctant to commit. From this point onwards, I felt very I GUESS.jpg about this book; Saint's characterizations of both Clytemnestra and Elektra, and her narrative choices post-death of Agamemnon, felt very... passive?... and emotionally, pretty shallow/surface-level, and not particularly persuasive. I kept thinking about this one post about how the greatest sin in a fictional character is not to be unlikable or a bad person but to be boring— and, like, if you're worried about your main characters being Unlikeable or Bad, maybe don't write a retelling of the freaking Oresteia???
I had already borrowed Saint's Ariadne - about the princess of Crete who helps Theseus defeat the Minotaur and, ultimately, ends up as the wife of Dionysus - so despite the unpromising first impression of her Greek myth retellings, I read it anyway, and I did like it better than Elektra. I think, on the one hand, it suffered less from comparison— although most of the myths woven into this story were familiar to me, some weren't, and there was a sense of novelty in the way that the stories were strung together into an overarching narrative— and on the other, it just... worked better, as a novel? Despite the title, the story's focus is split between Ariadne and her sister Phaedra, so maybe it's that the two-POV-split is Just Right while Elektra's three-POV-split (between Clytemnestra, Cassandra, and Elektra) tried to cover too much ground in too little space, and ended up spreading the narrative too thinly to give it any real depth...? Interestingly, the ending is super dark - it ends with Dionysus' revenge on Argos and (rather out of left field?) Ariadne's death at the hands (er, eyes?) of Perseus' Medusa-head shield - and packs an emotional punch, so it's clearly not that Saint can't write like that. I feel like Ariadne did a better job of building up the characters and their relationships, so I did ultimately feel shocked and sad when the ending came to pass, whereas in Elektra, I knew the underlying story so well already and was looking for something a little less surface-level plot regurgitation from a retelling?
I had already borrowed Saint's Ariadne - about the princess of Crete who helps Theseus defeat the Minotaur and, ultimately, ends up as the wife of Dionysus - so despite the unpromising first impression of her Greek myth retellings, I read it anyway, and I did like it better than Elektra. I think, on the one hand, it suffered less from comparison— although most of the myths woven into this story were familiar to me, some weren't, and there was a sense of novelty in the way that the stories were strung together into an overarching narrative— and on the other, it just... worked better, as a novel? Despite the title, the story's focus is split between Ariadne and her sister Phaedra, so maybe it's that the two-POV-split is Just Right while Elektra's three-POV-split (between Clytemnestra, Cassandra, and Elektra) tried to cover too much ground in too little space, and ended up spreading the narrative too thinly to give it any real depth...? Interestingly, the ending is super dark - it ends with Dionysus' revenge on Argos and (rather out of left field?) Ariadne's death at the hands (er, eyes?) of Perseus' Medusa-head shield - and packs an emotional punch, so it's clearly not that Saint can't write like that. I feel like Ariadne did a better job of building up the characters and their relationships, so I did ultimately feel shocked and sad when the ending came to pass, whereas in Elektra, I knew the underlying story so well already and was looking for something a little less surface-level plot regurgitation from a retelling?
