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livAuthor: Inge Merkel
Details: (c) 1987 Residenz Verlag; Pub 2000 Ariadne Press; Trans Renate Latimer; Original title Eine ganz gewöhnliche Ehe; ISBN 1-57241-075-2
Verdict: Odysseus and Penelope – an ordinary marriage is a successful and moving modern exploration of mythology.
Reasons for reading it: I wanted a change from SF and it's been on my reading pile for a while now.
How it came into my hands: The wonderfullab sent it to me as part of her ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
livelongnmarry auction offering. I'd asked for some modern Austrian literature and this is an example.
Odysseus and Penelope is one of the most successful retellings of classical myth I've come across. I've only read a little bit of Homer in the original (and little bits of the Classical-era playwrights), and the rest is just familiar to me from general cultural background, but O&P comes close to capturing the feel of the Odyssey. I think it is at the right level of "zoom", somehow, it's recounting a story which is epic and heroic, yet the people are believable people without invoking the psychological type of characterization common in twentieth century novels. The fact I was reading in translation probably helped in a way; there were definitely long passages where I could easily imagine it was translated from pre-Classical Greek rather than German. (The disadvantage of the translation was that the poetry, in the form of classical-style choruses, didn't really work.) And it doesn't twist the story to make it more plausible to a modern, rationalist audience; it's taken for granted that the gods actually exist and the heroes are something more than human.
It's a very interesting kind of feminism, too. Merkel's Penelope is not in any way an anachronistic feminist. She's absolutely believable for how an intelligent woman might have interacted with ancient society, caring about honour and sexual fidelity and motherhood and genuinely having the ambition of serving her menfolk, but not at all being a doormat. She gets on the whole a pretty good break in life: Odysseus is rich enough to provide material comforts, and he genuinely likes and respects her and treats her as a real person, albeit not as his equal. She gains respect as the head of the domestic sphere, and successfully raises a son to take his rightful place in adult society. But even though she accomplishes most of her goals and is clearly better off than almost any other woman mentioned in the book, her misery and suffering come through very clearly. It's very interesting to frame her twenty years of waiting for Odysseus' return, and the rest of her life trying to rebuild a relationship with the husband of her youth, as an epic. The writing is strong enough that you really do experience Penelope's domestic, bounded existence as something heroic, and that seems a lot more effective than the more obvious feminist re-visioning which bludgeons you over the head with the fact that most traditional stories are about male concerns.
Interestingly, we do get quite a lot of Odysseus' point of view as well. The story is very sympathetic to him and his attitude to sex and masculinity and so on. Also, Odysseus' encounters with the divine are very impressively numinous and mystical, and the emotional effects of his visit to Tiresias in Hades are particularly powerful. The story never explicitly mentions that a modern female reader would be likely to identify much more strongly with Odysseus than Penelope; it simply allows you to do so, yet presents such a compelling portrayal of Penelope that you are forced to consider her perspective too.
The only part that I disliked was the section where conversations between Odysseus and Penelope are presented in great detail, and he babbles at her about people from various cultures he's met on his travels. It's too much realism in conveying the idea that Odysseus likes to use Penelope as a sounding board for a bunch of philosophizing without checking if she's really interested (the deathbed scene is both funny and poignant, when the only time she actually gets to say her piece is when her husband is laid out ready for burial). But not only is it boring, Odysseus' ramblings about Buddhism, African cultures and so on is too obviously an anachronistic attempt at diversity (where the rest of the book is impressive in being non-modern). I was particularly annoyed by his encounter with some Jewish Egyptian slaves, which basically reads like apologetics for why Christian monotheism is better than any polytheistic traditions, only it can't have actual Christians because the story takes place well before Jesus' time.
Details: (c) 1987 Residenz Verlag; Pub 2000 Ariadne Press; Trans Renate Latimer; Original title Eine ganz gewöhnliche Ehe; ISBN 1-57241-075-2
Verdict: Odysseus and Penelope – an ordinary marriage is a successful and moving modern exploration of mythology.
Reasons for reading it: I wanted a change from SF and it's been on my reading pile for a while now.
How it came into my hands: The wonderful
lab sent it to me as part of her livelongnmarry auction offering. I'd asked for some modern Austrian literature and this is an example. Odysseus and Penelope is one of the most successful retellings of classical myth I've come across. I've only read a little bit of Homer in the original (and little bits of the Classical-era playwrights), and the rest is just familiar to me from general cultural background, but O&P comes close to capturing the feel of the Odyssey. I think it is at the right level of "zoom", somehow, it's recounting a story which is epic and heroic, yet the people are believable people without invoking the psychological type of characterization common in twentieth century novels. The fact I was reading in translation probably helped in a way; there were definitely long passages where I could easily imagine it was translated from pre-Classical Greek rather than German. (The disadvantage of the translation was that the poetry, in the form of classical-style choruses, didn't really work.) And it doesn't twist the story to make it more plausible to a modern, rationalist audience; it's taken for granted that the gods actually exist and the heroes are something more than human.
It's a very interesting kind of feminism, too. Merkel's Penelope is not in any way an anachronistic feminist. She's absolutely believable for how an intelligent woman might have interacted with ancient society, caring about honour and sexual fidelity and motherhood and genuinely having the ambition of serving her menfolk, but not at all being a doormat. She gets on the whole a pretty good break in life: Odysseus is rich enough to provide material comforts, and he genuinely likes and respects her and treats her as a real person, albeit not as his equal. She gains respect as the head of the domestic sphere, and successfully raises a son to take his rightful place in adult society. But even though she accomplishes most of her goals and is clearly better off than almost any other woman mentioned in the book, her misery and suffering come through very clearly. It's very interesting to frame her twenty years of waiting for Odysseus' return, and the rest of her life trying to rebuild a relationship with the husband of her youth, as an epic. The writing is strong enough that you really do experience Penelope's domestic, bounded existence as something heroic, and that seems a lot more effective than the more obvious feminist re-visioning which bludgeons you over the head with the fact that most traditional stories are about male concerns.
Interestingly, we do get quite a lot of Odysseus' point of view as well. The story is very sympathetic to him and his attitude to sex and masculinity and so on. Also, Odysseus' encounters with the divine are very impressively numinous and mystical, and the emotional effects of his visit to Tiresias in Hades are particularly powerful. The story never explicitly mentions that a modern female reader would be likely to identify much more strongly with Odysseus than Penelope; it simply allows you to do so, yet presents such a compelling portrayal of Penelope that you are forced to consider her perspective too.
The only part that I disliked was the section where conversations between Odysseus and Penelope are presented in great detail, and he babbles at her about people from various cultures he's met on his travels. It's too much realism in conveying the idea that Odysseus likes to use Penelope as a sounding board for a bunch of philosophizing without checking if she's really interested (the deathbed scene is both funny and poignant, when the only time she actually gets to say her piece is when her husband is laid out ready for burial). But not only is it boring, Odysseus' ramblings about Buddhism, African cultures and so on is too obviously an anachronistic attempt at diversity (where the rest of the book is impressive in being non-modern). I was particularly annoyed by his encounter with some Jewish Egyptian slaves, which basically reads like apologetics for why Christian monotheism is better than any polytheistic traditions, only it can't have actual Christians because the story takes place well before Jesus' time.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-10 06:35 pm (UTC)Though I must say my favourite myth reinterpretation so far is Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy.