Ithaca: The exquisite, gripping tale that breathes life into ancient myth (The Songs of Penelope)

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Not only did Ithaca give me wonderful characters to root for, it did so from stories I’ve known all my life and has thus altered them in my memory. Although it took me a while to become invested in Penelope, she did become a fascinating character and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing her outsmart the men of Ithaca. Where are the Phaecians based, and if Odysseus sailed east to get there, then where the hell has he been hanging out?

I’ve never read a story that has Penelope feeling ambivalence or anything but a deep and lasting love and passion for her husband. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I was intrigued when I heard that Claire North would be switching it up and moving to a new genre from her traditional sci-fi arena, but she treats this subject matter the same as she does her wild sci-fi concepts: with great care for worldbuilding (here, mostly historical details and musings on the place of women in Ancient Greece), character, and theme. Hera, Queen of the Gods, a greatly diminished figure herself, is telling the audience these tales that the poets do not. So we must follow Hera and Penelope down the rabbit hole of who might be attacking the island and why, and then also figure out how to defend an island when the only men are largely untrained teenagers and old men.

It seems like a small thing, but it presents a genuine mindset shift for a twenty first century reader that needs to be handled without jarring people from what they’re reading, while also engaging with the reality of the time. The Silence of the Girls and A Thousand Ships offered a feminist perspective, but Ithaca gives Penelope and the women of Ithaca real agency, even as they weaponize their veils and mourning customs, steal every advantage of silence, sex, gossip, and the appearance of meekness, and get away with, well, murder because men can't actually wrap their heads around women as capable and intelligent beings. Like Penelope at her loom North both weaves and unweaves, teasing out the threads of Homeric myth to recombine them into something unique, wonderful and urgently contemporary -- M.

There are main characters too, of course, who do have more onpage time, but Hera is fickle and arbitrarily decides who gets her attention best, favouring a character that's not Penelope. But now, years on, speculation is mounting that her husband is dead, and suitors are beginning to knock at her door. These characters are given depth; they are entertainingly and deeply flawed, ultimately grappling with their own place in a patriarchal society . Unfortunately, some of the suitors were tired of waiting and decided to break all the rules to get what they wanted before someone else does. We know the story of the suitors and how Odysseus tricked and defeated them, but Penelope’s entire experience is often glazed over.Even at moments where Hera outlines what is happening outside of Ithaca, she tells of how other women are being treated. Cependant et pour conclure c’est un récit que j’ai pris plaisir à lire une histoire qui nous permet d’avoir un regard féminin sur des mythes qui sont souvent étudiés par le prisme masculin. She observes the action from the vantage point of a goddess with a bird’s-eye view of Ithaca, zooms in to its more intimate spaces, and gives access to men only conversations and gatherings denied to women.

This is not a bad reinterpretation of the events going on in the background in Ithaca while Odysseus is laboriously making his way home after the Trojan war - or, to be more accurate at this particular juncture, being entertained at excessive length by Calypso - the whole journey taking so long that he is presumed dead. You don't connect with the characters, there are too many of them that have their time in the sun for one second, some appearing just in a line, a couple of dialogue exchanges, a fleeting run by the place.I should confess though it is Penelope's retelling, I enjoyed Elektra and Clytemnestra most, Yes we have Agamemnon's wife and daughter here, Athena and Artemis too! Das ist vom Konzept her schon sehr schlüssig, auch wenn ich vielleicht nicht unbedingt die Zielgruppe bin.

With its well-written, fluid and elegant prose, even pacing throughout the novel, and themes of feminism, survival and loyalty Claire North’s Ithaca is an engaging read that I would recommend to fans of Greek Mythology and those fond of feminist retellings.As Queen of Ithaca, she might seem like a regal, authoritative figure, but this is ancient Greece, and she wields little power. Having read Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad recently and loving it, I had hoped to hear more about Penelope and her maids and the events in Ithaca during Odysseus’s absence from Penelope’s perspective. Pirates have been raiding her villages, Illyrians, she’s meant to believe, but privately she’s not convinced. Das Tempo ist hier aber deutlich höher und ich konnte mit Ithaca deutlich mehr anfangen - aber auch weil ich die Odysseussage zumindest rudimentär kenne.