Monday, August 27, 2012

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

I really enjoyed reading this book, which fills out the myth of Achilles and Patroclus--starting long before Homer does, and ending just short of the Underworld. The broad strokes of the story will be no surprise to anyone familiar with the Trojan War. Miller's well versed in those stories (for example, she chooses not to include the part of the story where Achilles's only vulnerability is his heel, an addition to the myth that probably developed after Homer's time), and she's fairly meticulous about the details she includes. But the heart of what makes the story work is the characters. I found her portrayal of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus moving--each helped the other become his best (and the brief portrait of Neoptolemus, who was raised by his grandmother Thetis, shows the inhuman cruelty Achilles could have obtained). If anything, what Miller gives us is a reading of Homer. It fills in some of the (what we would perceive today as) gaps in the Homeric version and provides motivations for many of the characters. Even though the story holds Odysseus at arm's length throughout the text, I couldn't help loving him even more in this portrayal (he's one of my favorites from those stories). Perhaps best of all, this book made me want to improve my Greek, so I could go back to Homer (and some of the others) and read them in the original (and fill in the gaps my own way).

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