Reading Diary: The Penelopiad

I seem not to have posted one of these in a month. Still diarying, but in a bitsier way, about halves of story collections and such.


18/04/2023

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Let it be known that I came in biased: I have never read any Margaret Atwood except her interview with Ursula Le Guin about science fiction. I know the two writers were good friends who did not approach writing from the same direction, and I've loved Le Guin for decade now (I'm twenty-six: nearly old enough to say 'decades'). What I know of Atwood is mainly her attempt to call what she does something other than science fiction – when she does it, don't you know, it's not about warp drives, it's about characters. If I wanted to start by liking Margaret Atwood, I think I should try her realist short stories, and I may yet do that. However, I am writing a book with bits of Odyssey in it, so.

Initial result: liked it just exactly as little as I expected. The flippancy, the presentism, Penelope's shade in Hades talking about the passing time, Christian Hell appearing next to Hades as though that were not a way of imagining afterlives so different from the ancient Greek that you have to do some work if you want them both in the same place, not just throw it into your soup (it is possible I may at one time have been a Classics student)

This would seem to have me two for two on disliking feminist retellings of the Odyssey, (I also don't care for Circe much, though, more than this) which is a shame.

This said, I am only on chapter five of The Penelopiad.



19/04/2023

How is it respecting the lives of the twelve murdered maids to have them convey their perspective in bad poetry? How is it respecting Penelope's intelligence to have her discover blatantly obvious facts about her situation years later, in Hades, after her own death? I do not like this book very much! Also, the first note of character we get about Telemachus is that he seriously considered murdering his mother for his own convenience but decided it would be a bad bet. You can't just drop that in there! Orestes found kin-murder hard enough enough to do that it took him several plays! And Penelope sends the maids to be raped, and hates Helen who she views as a rival. In this book, one person is seldom kind to another without our getting the note that they were reluctant about it, or somehow obnoxious in the doing of it, or tactical about it. This reminded me of the Naomi Novik paragraphs where someone lays out the cold clear economics of a situation, except without the bit where human kindness complicates it.

(I mean I'm only halfway through The Penelopiad, this is characterisation of Penelope, I shall keep reading).

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( Spoilers upon finishing the book )

Reading Diary: the start of Housekeeping

And now coming back to the present! Much less review-y, notes made mainly as I went

26/04/2023

I don't find this quite successful in its handling of time. It ducks into flashback after flashback. I think I have this problem because it's gliding at some remove, at life-pace – we have only had a few prolonged scenes by chapter two. So that makes me want to be moving pretty steadily forward if I'm to track it.

The images though! The train sliding down into the lake without trace. The surface of the lake closing seamlessly again over it like normality closing over tragedy.

I have written a story set in freezing winter, but I do not know that season well, I couldn't write icicles thawing so fast the gravel under the eaves rattles and jumps. This book is full of winter.

[It makes me think of Elizabeth Knox on one hand and Moomins on the other (should reread Moomins, and I think I never read the last few, come to think of it, the melancholy ones).

I think of Moomins because of winter but also because I'd written out the following quote, about a flooded house, for the kind of detail the book has, and it makes me think of the Hobgoblin's Hat:]

“The pantry curtain rod was deeply bowed by the weight of water climbing up the curtains. If we opened or closed a door, a wave swept through the house, and chairs tottered, and bottles and pots clinked and clunked in the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets.”

I thought of Elizabeth Knox because of the sense of Christian theology, or if not theology then Christianity-inflected mysticism (I've heard Elizabeth and Francis Spufford discuss this onstage, they both believe in something like God, but were unsure whether they believed in the same one). They share a concern with passing things, and have similarities of language: in this book we get sentences like “Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look but not to buy.”

I started out thinking I disliked how this book handled time. I think now that that's because it doesn't cue transitions very much, landing me unexpectedly in flashbacks and dreams of unknown length, but also not singling out the moment when a description of what's been damaged in the flood shifts from the scale of the town to the scale of a single house – neither going back out to town-scale nor having any action follow at the house-scale. Besides this I am liking it more and more.