Book Review: Piranesi

 

•  Author: Susanna Clarke

• Where I bought this book: A Room of One's Own, Madison, Wisc. 

• Why I bought this book: I was looking for a title by a similarly named author, and came across this instead.

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        Yes, there is a story in here, and it's a wonderful one, so it's worth your while to get to it.

    But what keeps you going in this magical place are the descriptions. The fantastical, detailed discoveries behind every door, in every chamber and hall, filled with statues that delight and compel and charm. 

    Yes, Piranesi's wanderings are fun to follow. His attempts to divine the origins and implications of where he is keep the tale from his journals moving along.

    It's a remarkably strange place, even for a fantasy book. It could be a world inside a building, or a building that it a world. We don't know. We explore its ramifications with Piranesi, as he speaks to us through those writings.

    Piranesi is all but alone in the world. There is someone else, named The Other. There is evidence of other people who are or have been there, but it's all speculation, based on snippets of writings he has found.  

 One sentence puzzles me: The world was constantly speaking to Ancient Man. I do not understand why this sentence is in the past tense. The World still speaks to me every day.

    Indeed, the pleasure of this book is not the story of who Piranesi is and where he is, but the place itself, and the secrets it hides. Sometimes, the story actually gets in the way of the pleasure of reading this remarkable book.

    Yes, the secrets are revealed. It is well worth waiting for.        

Book Review: Song of Achilles

The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

This is a story about love.

But it's also a story about rage, and war, and the killing fields, and how any of those can stand in the way and kill the heart. It's a story about how the three together can destroy the soul.

It's a tale based on The Iliad by Homer, with a few twists. Achilles still is heroic, handsome, and courageous, the warrior who will save Helen from the Trojans and allow the Greeks to sack Troy. He is neither a king nor a god, but he remains the best the Greeks have to offer.

But Achilles' song is not the beautiful tunes he plays on the lyre, but is his anger and bloodlust. It torments not only  him, but his friend and lover, Patroclus, during Achilles' early life and later through the long siege of Troy.  Patroclus fears Achilles will be remembered only for the number of men he killed during battle.

"Perhaps such things pass for virtue among the gods," Patroclus says. "But how is there glory in taking a life? We die so easily."

It is up to Achilles to choose: A prophecy has given him the choice of being a hero who dies young, or an old man who lives out a long life in obscurity.

Miller is a Greek scholar who has written this gem of a book, which describes an alternative to The Iliad. It's wonderfully written -- poetic even -- and full of tightly written tales and varying perspectives that gives voice to the men who fought the wars and the women they held captive.

Through Patroclus -- her narrator and bard for Achilles, not just during their lives, but after they pass into death -- Miller explores Achilles's life and relationships, She explicitly portrays Achilles and Patroclus as lovers. That's a relationship that Homer may have hinted at, but never described. It's something that later writers have alluded to and tried to explain, often by putting it into the Greek context. Those descriptions show the two men may have had brief sexual encounters, and even loved one another, but they also had wives and children. Miller describes their relationship, except for a few incidents, as an exclusive, lifelong companionship.

Miller, who also wrote Circe, from the back cover of The Song of Achilles

She also delves into the relationship between Achilles and his mother, the sea-nymph goddess, Thetis, Narrator Patroclus also explores his own relationship (not good) with Thetis, as well as his relationship (good) with the war-prize slave Briseis, whom Patroclus saves from the hands of Agamemnon, who wanted her as his bride and slave.

Miller tutors us on the myths and legends of other Greek gods and warriors, including Odysseus, Hector, and Paris. In her notes, she tells us the legend of Achilles' heel is not something Homer wrote about, but that came along much later. In dismissing it, Miller gives it a single, oblique reference: A warrior, with the god Apollo by his side, attempts to kills Achilles.

"Where do I aim?" says the man. "I heard he was invulnerable. Except for ..."

"He is a man," Apollo replied. "Not a god. Shoot him and he will die."

Book Review: The Bees

The Bees, by Laline Paull

In the grand literary tradition of animals taking on human characteristics, Paull has given us a hive of honeybees that are feminist, pro-labor, and loyal. She uses them to tell a tale of love, life, hope, and commitment.

She hits the mark several times over.

The Bees gives us Flora 717, your basic worker bee. She's born to clean up after the other bees, and she does it so well that she uncharacteristically gets a chance to see other parts of the hive -- the egg-delivery rooms, the nurseries, even the queen's lair. But while she stays true to her kin, she does find that she enjoys -- and is really good at -- foraging for pollen and other bee-foods. It's a top hive job. Still, a key element of Flora is that in time or crisis, pain, or adversity, she returns to her kin, working quietly and unobtrusively among them, and proudly standing by their side.

As the books goes on, she also finds something else unusual about herself, but that borders on a spoiler, so you'll have to read the book to find out.

And you should. It's an enjoyable, well-written book. Her descriptions of bee behavior are accurate -- as they should be, seeing that she credits one of the world's premiere entomologists, E.O. Wilson, as an adviser. Bees are clearly a matriarchal society; she even portrays the male drones as exhibiting the behaviour of drunken frat rats. But as will be seen, #notalldrones.

She does take some literary license -- giving the bees speech, a level of sentience that nears anthropological to the extreme, and human thoughts and feelings. All that is fine: It gives us the opportunity to be like the bees, as much as she portrays the bees as being like us.

For instance, Paull's description of the forager bees waiting for the rain to clear so they can take flight is amazingly similar to my feelings as a runner when the weather refuses to cooperate with my running plans. The bees' returning after a long day gathering pollen matches that of a runner after a grueling marathon:

          "It was all (she) could do to latch her wings, then take herself to the canteen and eat whatever was put in front of her. She sat at the foragers' table and drew comfort from their presence, and now she understood why they did not speak, for it was not possible to do anything more than eat, drink cool water ... and find a place to rest. ... She took herself to a dormitory and collapsed."

Hive behavior also borders on the religious. The motto is: "Accept. Obey. Serve." The ceremony and language of Catholicism comes into play. Consider the hive's prayer to the queen: "Blessed be the sisters/ Who take away our sin/ Our mother, who art in labor/ Hallowed be Thy womb."

This book is about bees, but more than that: It's about us. It's about our caste system, and how we are, for the most part, locked into a caste at birth and struggling mightily to improve. It's about how we can be held back not only by those above us, but by those who are our own kin.

It's also about how we can break out of that caste and fly freely.

This Week in Books, 4th Ed.

When the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction was announced this week, I saw that two of the nominations are shelved in the TBR library. Not only that, but my current read, The Bees, by Laline Paull, was a shortlisted finalist for the award in 2015.So I wanted to know more.

                                                                   Photo from Women's Prize website
 The judges with their selection of the 16 books longlisted 

The award, dubbed one of the most prestigious in the UK, is given annually for the best novel written in English by a woman of any nationality.

Book awards in the UK have interesting logistics. First off, they announce a longlist, about a dozen to 18 novels of the best of the best. About six weeks later (April 29 this year for the Women's Prize) comes the shortlist, with the top five books becoming finalists. After a buildup, a ceremony is held to announce and honor the winner (June 5, 2019). The Man Booker and other awards use a similar method.

It's sort of the way the Oscars are heralded, and it's nice to see literary awards get the attention they deserve.

Such lists also are a great method to find new novels one might otherwise overlook. For years, I've used the Man Booker lists and found great novels written from different perspectives. The search will now include the longlist and shortlist of the Women's Prize, which seeks out and honors women writers from around the world.

"Written by women. For Everyone" is its motto. Previous winners include Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in 2007, The Song of Archilles, by Madeine Miller in 2012, The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver in 2010, and last year's top novel, Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie.


I have read two books on this year's longlist. Circe is the story of a minor Greek goddess, the daughter of the Titan sun god Helios. Because she is the goddess of witchcraft, she is banished to a deserted island. Here, Miller tells the story from Circe's perspective, including her meetings with Greek gods and heroes, such as the stories of the Minotaur, Medea, Icarus and his doomed flight to the sun, and one of her lovers, Odysseus. I read it last year at a time I was not keeping up with this blog, so I have not written a review. But it is top rate.

Milkman also tells its story from the perspective of its main character, a teen-age girl growing up in a split community very much like a 1980s version of Northern Ireland. My review is here.




Before I wrote this blog post, I went for a four-mile run to clear the head and think. It was cold, 20 degrees when I started -- that's seven below for you guys outside the United States.


 Also, it started to snow.