Greek Myths: A New Retelling, with drawings by Chris Ofili

Product Information

Inside the palace, Clytemnestra led her husband through to the bath, and, with smooth assurance, helped him strip off his clothes. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. That is, it retells the myths without offering any new or refreshing points of view, while also doing it in the most chaotic way, oftentimes forgetting crucial plot details or explaining them in such backward way that they lose much of their original meaning. Recounting Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Trojan War of in The Iliad, The Odyssey, Homer’s Hymns, and so much more, I thoroughly enjoyed having a woman’s perspective on these stories.

A young woman and her sister, Procne who long to be birds to explore the world around them, but Procne's husband has other terrible ideas about Philomela. In Charlotte Higgins's thrilling new interpretation of these ancient stories, their tales combine to form a dazzling, sweeping epic of storytelling.Looking down from Olympus, Aphrodite smiled to herself, then shrugged, and started to comb out her long, shining hair. The book follows all the way to the end of the Odysseus, but I always thought that Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad was a better ending to the story of Penelope and Odysseus. Higgins does this without giving any woman vitality, voice, agency, or any quality that makes them less blurry than any ubiquitous story with a woman in it. The ones I did read didn't provide any new information and there was very little actually about these women. Penelope is the last of the eight mythical weavers Higgins selects as her chapter headings; so rich is ancient mythology in these artists-in-yarn that she omits several more, including the nymph Calypso who loves and loses Odysseus, and Idaea, the wicked queen who blinded her stepsons with her shuttle.

Her most recent book Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths (Cape, 2018) was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Quite unobtrusively, she accessorizes Greek myths with motifs and effervescence that changes the entire bedrock upon which they are grounded. For the momentous task of creating workable threads from tufts of wool, dyeing them, and labouring at huge looms was the responsibility of women. Additionally, while the drawings are lovely in the book, I found it interesting that the author chose to use a male artist for what is supposed to be a female-centric book. She includes deft Homeric epithets (“the deathless goddess”), unobtrusive embedded quotations of resonant couplets from Sophoclean tragedy, and luscious Homeric similes at unexpected moments.It deserves so much praise, and I will be posting overviews of some of my thoughts (none of which are concise) over the coming weeks on a per chapter basis.

Andromache who knows that she's destined to lose her husband Hector all because of his awful brother and the woman who launched a thousand ships, Helen. Circe weaves and sees so many of the women who were tossed aside by men, women like her niece Medea and Ariadne. However, if we ignore all that, I did still really enjoy listening to this one on my back and forth work commutes.

The book would make a perfect introduction to the entrancing world of Greek myth for any secondary school student.

I enjoyed the presentation as stories being woven rather than standalone as it helps show the interconnection between all the myths. uk will use the information you provide on this form to be in touch with you and to provide updates and marketing. Weaving was a metaphor at the heart of ancient metaphysics, since the Fates measure out and cut off the threads of human life itself.

I’ve never read a compendium of Greek mythology quite like this; written variously from the POV’s female characters such as Penelope and Helen — they narrate their own myths as well as those of ancient gods and goddesses (and famous heroes, too! But, the way in which it is told sort of left me feeling unable to connect with the people and story.