Reading Diary: The Penelopiad
Apr. 26th, 2023 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI 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
...
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).
...
To be less snipe-y for a minute: this book is Penelope's perspective on the events of her life – the new information provided us by this is mainly 'It's like you've heard, but I knew more about what was going on, and the glamorous bits weren't really that good' – but it's also the story of the twelve maids that Penelope and Odysseus share responsibility for killing. We don't learn many of their names or much about their character; we learn that they got by as best they could as slaves, laughed and joked with and helped Penelope, and then were betrayed. And at the end of the story they hide their faces from Penelope – she can't see them, can't hear their story – and haunt Odysseus, they're doing what The Penelopiad wants to do for The Odyssey, make sure Penelope can't receive Odysseus back into her arms in innocence, because twelve women who did no wrong are dead for it. They aren't characterised because The Odyssey doesn't characterise them and so we, the readers, do not get to know. This is evocative. I like the ending of this book. I like, too, the chapter where like the chapter where the twelve dead maids do a sarcastic mythographic analysis of their own deaths – it wasn't really violence, don't you know, because it symbolises part of the history of an otherwise unrecorded cult of Artemis.
Why the book still doesn't work for me:
1. I'm not joking about how bad the poetry of the maids' chorus is.
2. I am bored of the style of myth retelling that sweeps the mythic off the table and says, “Let me tell you, folks, what it was really like at Camelot, and let's get two things clear from the get-go: the Grail was a scam and Merlin was senile.” Myth and epic do things in addition to propaganda, so it's tiresome to see them torn down like curtains.
3. I shouldn't expect ancient Penelope to have modern feminism, but to have her call Helen 'the septic bitch, root cause of all my misfortunes' feels grounded in modern sexism instead, and there is no indication in this book that Helen isn't exactly the sexist caricature she can be in other tellings.
18/04/2023
...
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).
...
To be less snipe-y for a minute: this book is Penelope's perspective on the events of her life – the new information provided us by this is mainly 'It's like you've heard, but I knew more about what was going on, and the glamorous bits weren't really that good' – but it's also the story of the twelve maids that Penelope and Odysseus share responsibility for killing. We don't learn many of their names or much about their character; we learn that they got by as best they could as slaves, laughed and joked with and helped Penelope, and then were betrayed. And at the end of the story they hide their faces from Penelope – she can't see them, can't hear their story – and haunt Odysseus, they're doing what The Penelopiad wants to do for The Odyssey, make sure Penelope can't receive Odysseus back into her arms in innocence, because twelve women who did no wrong are dead for it. They aren't characterised because The Odyssey doesn't characterise them and so we, the readers, do not get to know. This is evocative. I like the ending of this book. I like, too, the chapter where like the chapter where the twelve dead maids do a sarcastic mythographic analysis of their own deaths – it wasn't really violence, don't you know, because it symbolises part of the history of an otherwise unrecorded cult of Artemis.
Why the book still doesn't work for me:
1. I'm not joking about how bad the poetry of the maids' chorus is.
2. I am bored of the style of myth retelling that sweeps the mythic off the table and says, “Let me tell you, folks, what it was really like at Camelot, and let's get two things clear from the get-go: the Grail was a scam and Merlin was senile.” Myth and epic do things in addition to propaganda, so it's tiresome to see them torn down like curtains.
3. I shouldn't expect ancient Penelope to have modern feminism, but to have her call Helen 'the septic bitch, root cause of all my misfortunes' feels grounded in modern sexism instead, and there is no indication in this book that Helen isn't exactly the sexist caricature she can be in other tellings.
