30 Day Book Challenge - Day 10

Post 10 - Favorite Classic Book

For this topic, while there was for obvious reasons a real temptation to discuss that famous Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, I ultimately decided to go with something a bit more well-known, namely the Odyssey of Homer.

Now, the Odyssey is a classic in every since of the word - many of most iconic images of Greek mythology, such as the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe - even the Trojan Horse has its chronologically earliest mention here, rather than in the Iliad (in which it is not mentioned at all).

More tied to Odysseus himself, but no less fun to read about are instances such as the trip to the Underworld, and his stratagems against Penelope's suitors. Most of these episodes have been told, and retold, and are as familiar as they are fun to revisit.

But upon a deeper look, there's a bit more to The Odyssey than a fantastical Classical Grecian picaresque. The various episodes appear quite out of order, and when you sort through the digressions and flashbacks and shifts in viewpoint, a curious pattern emerges - all those famous incidents with incredible creatures appear in stories told by Odysseus (mostly to the Phaeacians), while the "real-time" sections deal with almost entirely mundane events, such as the intrigues aimed at dislodging The Suitors. There is an unspoken but definite possibility that Ulysses (renowned for his sneakyness) might not be an entirely reliable narrator about his adventures with giants and witches.

What's more, Odysseus' more fantastic adventures are neatly framed by the two huge storms, one at the beginning of his adventures (right before the Lotus Eaters) and the other at the end (as he makes his escape from Calypso's Island). This suggests that (assuming Odysseus is not just telling tall tales) the fantastic elements exist at a remove from the "real" world.

The potential for varied interpretations like these are no doubt just as important to the survival of The Odyssey as the ubiquity of the various incidents. However, even the deepest stories also need to be fun to tell and retell, and the genius of The Odyssey is that it manages to provide both.

30 Day Book Challenge - Day 9

A couple of weeks ago it came to my attention that the Egotist's Club blog - from whom, readers may recall, I borrowed the 30 Days Book Challenge - have started a new round of structured literary posting. While I'm far too behind on that to even consider participating, interested parties should go read all their Book Meme 2012 posts.

And speaking of the Book Challenge, I should probably be getting back to that:

Post 9 - A Book You Thought You Wouldn't Like But Ended Up Loving

One of the things I appreciated about my college education was the encouragement to read things that were out of my comfort zone, making me and the other students more well-rounded, better educated individuals, at least in theory.

Which isn't to say that "loving" isn't too strong a word for my feelings about, say, Aristophanes' comedic play The Frogs, but I still found it much more enjoyable than one would expect of a work over twenty-four centuries old.

Ironically enough, one of the things that I enjoyed about it was how modern it seemed at times. The first half of the book, particularly, is absolutely rife with the sort of metafictional commentary that one would expect to find in a more modern piece - the first line, even, is one of the characters offering to present the audience (this was a play, remember) with "one of the old gags".

Not all of the play was this sort of modern-seeming meta-referencing, however - several amusing parts, such as a sequence where Dionysus and his slave Xanthias keeping switching around their single Heracles costume (depending on whether or not it was advantageous to be mistaken for Heracles), have the air of something that made slightly more sense, or at least had better resonance, in its original context*. On the other and, much of the second act devolves into a argument among Dionysus and various Greek literary figures, which I found to be highly technical and not interesting in the least.

But, if only for the first part where Dionysus and Xanthias are making their farcical journey to the Underworld, I am glad that I was compelled to read The Frogs. It's always a good idea to break away from "the usual" once in a while, and believe me - not much about The Frogs is "usual".


*On the other hand, I freely admit that "slapstick comedy" isn't my preferred genre, and it's quite possible that the quick-change clothes-swapping trope is alive and well in contemporary comedy and just escaped my notice.