Recent reading
May. 6th, 2020 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseaux- Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, a retelling of the Iliad focused on Breseis and the other captive women living in the Greek army's camp in the last years of the Trojan war. It's primarily told through Briseis's perspective but as the story progresses, her narration is interspersed with chapters from Achilles' (and Patroclus', once or twice) POV, in third instead of first person. Interesting to compare characterizations to other retellings. The dialogue was modern, slangy, and distinctly British, which was initially jarring but ultimately worked.
- Anne Carson's An Oresteia, a translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Elektra, and Euripides' Orestes. This was different in both translation and source material from the production of the Oresteia I saw last year - which was adapted from Aeschylus' trilogy - but it was same basic myth, so it felt more or less familiar* until I got to Euripides' Orestes, at which point things went wildly off the rails.** I really liked her Kassandra - who also has a cameo at the end of The Silence of the Girls - and Elektra, at least in Sophocles' play. (Euripides' was super weird.)
* Although Sophocles' Elektra does feature a bizarre moment where Orestes sees his sister for the first time in ?? years and decides to break the ice by convincing her he's dead. With props.
** It starts out with Elektra and Orestes being sentenced to death for Klytemnestra's murder, at which point they - and Pylades, who has decided he's more Antique Roman than Dane,*** as it were**** - decide to murder Helen of Troy because, hey, they're going to die anyway! This plan then fails due to a literal deus ex machina.
*** Speaking of Hamlet, the beginning of Elektra had big Act 1, Scene 2 vibes.
**** I recognize the irony of applying this phrase to a character in a Greek play from 408 BCE.
- A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie, which was a very charming Miss Marple mystery involving a full half-dozen elderly women in different roles. As usual, I completely failed to figure out whodunnit, although I did predict one half of a red herring/plot twist and honestly, that's better than my success rate for some of her other novels. It also contains what is in retrospect one of the most genuinely chilling moments in Christie's work: the murderer made a big deal of her friend's birthday to give her one last happy day before killing her to ensure she kept her silence.
- October, a history of Russia's tumultuous 1917, by China Miéville— who, it turns out, has a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics as well as writing fantasy novels! Overall it was a mostly engaging narrative that occasionally felt like digging through concrete with my fingernails, generally in direct correlation to how many different parties, committees, and/or -isms (defencism, statism, Leninism, Kamenevism, etc.) were involved in a given sentence. This was only partially Miéville’s fault - the man cannot be blamed for the inherent chaos of the Russian revolution - but what IS his fault is a tendency towards artistically, needlessly obscure language. (One could even call it grandiloquent, or orotund.) I'm very glad I read this as an e-book and could just tap a word to find its definition, because if I'd had to stop at LEAST every other page to look up what "splenetic" or "perspicacious" (or gallimaufry, sybaritism, glossolalic, desiderata, jacquerie, or coterminous) meant, I would have lost my mind.
- Anne Carson's An Oresteia, a translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Elektra, and Euripides' Orestes. This was different in both translation and source material from the production of the Oresteia I saw last year - which was adapted from Aeschylus' trilogy - but it was same basic myth, so it felt more or less familiar* until I got to Euripides' Orestes, at which point things went wildly off the rails.** I really liked her Kassandra - who also has a cameo at the end of The Silence of the Girls - and Elektra, at least in Sophocles' play. (Euripides' was super weird.)
* Although Sophocles' Elektra does feature a bizarre moment where Orestes sees his sister for the first time in ?? years and decides to break the ice by convincing her he's dead. With props.
** It starts out with Elektra and Orestes being sentenced to death for Klytemnestra's murder, at which point they - and Pylades, who has decided he's more Antique Roman than Dane,*** as it were**** - decide to murder Helen of Troy because, hey, they're going to die anyway! This plan then fails due to a literal deus ex machina.
*** Speaking of Hamlet, the beginning of Elektra had big Act 1, Scene 2 vibes.
**** I recognize the irony of applying this phrase to a character in a Greek play from 408 BCE.
- A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie, which was a very charming Miss Marple mystery involving a full half-dozen elderly women in different roles. As usual, I completely failed to figure out whodunnit, although I did predict one half of a red herring/plot twist and honestly, that's better than my success rate for some of her other novels. It also contains what is in retrospect one of the most genuinely chilling moments in Christie's work: the murderer made a big deal of her friend's birthday to give her one last happy day before killing her to ensure she kept her silence.
- October, a history of Russia's tumultuous 1917, by China Miéville— who, it turns out, has a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics as well as writing fantasy novels! Overall it was a mostly engaging narrative that occasionally felt like digging through concrete with my fingernails, generally in direct correlation to how many different parties, committees, and/or -isms (defencism, statism, Leninism, Kamenevism, etc.) were involved in a given sentence. This was only partially Miéville’s fault - the man cannot be blamed for the inherent chaos of the Russian revolution - but what IS his fault is a tendency towards artistically, needlessly obscure language. (One could even call it grandiloquent, or orotund.) I'm very glad I read this as an e-book and could just tap a word to find its definition, because if I'd had to stop at LEAST every other page to look up what "splenetic" or "perspicacious" (or gallimaufry, sybaritism, glossolalic, desiderata, jacquerie, or coterminous) meant, I would have lost my mind.
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Date: 2020-05-10 06:01 am (UTC)I have got to read An Orestia. Was comparing translation notes with a friend and it looks absolutely great! Very evocative.
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Date: 2020-05-10 09:54 pm (UTC)Honestly, I didn't read it as sort of... an inherent neither-here-nor-there-ness of being half god and half mortal, but that he, understandably, has some complicated feelings about the fact his mother left when he was a child. There was one line that stuck out to me, about how she always seemed to be preemptively mourning his death.
That being said, Achilles' reaction to Bresies coming back to camp smelling of the sea was.......... super weird.
Very evocative.
There's definitely a reason that quotes from Carson's translation of the Oresteia were the hot thing on Tumblr (or my specific corner of it, anyway) at one point last year— it's really good!