Circe in Reading with Style

Apr 08, 2018 ☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018-gr-choice, memorabilia, pleasure, favorites, menu-reading-is-served

8 April 2018
Oh, gosh! I want it now! Can't wait for the publication! I expect it to be 5 stars... So, forgive me for prerating it already. It's like earmarking a favourite page...
Remember, I'm a sucker for all things Ancient Greece. Classical mythos are my blood, my marrow... I grew up on them. Circe was never my fav, I felt she was a villain, a malicious sorceress for her part in Odyssey... Let's see if this book helps me get a different perception on this legendary gal.

15 April 2018
So... This ...more

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Feb 28, 2019 Claire rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: grchoice, reading-women

This is such a lovely book. In a very intelligent story and a beautiful language, the author describes the story of Circe, the nymph.
It is remarkable and very enjoyable that M.Miller manages to resonate in an almost perfect and modern way the style and stories of the ancient Greek texts that came to us. My compliments for that, a great achievement it is.
I gave the book 4,5 stars, as maybe there were just too many stories brought together. It might have been better for understanding to go with ...more

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Nov 23, 2021 Andrew rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, mythology, book-club-books, feminist-fic

Dissapointing. Am ungodly boring book, dreary and ponderous. It was a tremendous struggle for me to complete this. In many ways, that's that's strange thing. It is, for one thing, beautifully written, staggering sometimes in its imagery. But it is soooo boring in plot. I don't know quite what, if anything, this adds to the tales of the Greek myths. The gods are appaling monsters, vain, cruel, petty, sadistic, malevolent, bitter creatures. Yeh? So? Anyone whose read even a page of the Greek myths Dissapointing. Am ungodly boring book, dreary and ponderous. It was a tremendous struggle for me to complete this. In many ways, that's that's strange thing. It is, for one thing, beautifully written, staggering sometimes in its imagery. But it is soooo boring in plot. I don't know quite what, if anything, this adds to the tales of the Greek myths. The gods are appaling monsters, vain, cruel, petty, sadistic, malevolent, bitter creatures. Yeh? So? Anyone whose read even a page of the Greek myths knows that the pantheon of Olympus and their offspring are some of the most wretched characters in all of fiction. That adds nothing new.

As for Circe herself, well, considering she's stuffed on an island, she becomes a remarkably static character, quite literally, she cannot go anywhere else. She does very little, responding to things that come to her. Huge swathes of backstory that occur elsewhere in the Greek world (and i must say, the sense of it being a shared universe, where all the myths live together is well crafted. You do get a sense of the multiple interactive elements of the mad mythos the Greeks made, a whole other world) have to be said by other characters, always in retrospect. This becomes dull and tedious very quickly, as does the writing style, if I'm honest, which loses its magical charm after about the 200 mark and transforms itself into more of a slog for reading. The book should have had, like, 100 pages hewn out, and it would have been great.

There is a sort of interesting notion about the active demythologising of myths, that myths are garbage, infantile fantasies cradled by the intellectually weak and emotionally vulnerable. Myth, as Roland Barthes correctly put it, is "depoliticised speech". It is an anti democratic, authoritarian and elitist art form that substitutes complex morality with black and white heroism and turns people into archetypes, politics into morals. Its bad and stupid, and in a culture as backwards as the one I live, Britain, our own myths are akin to that if medieval peasants, worshipped blindly, with the same tone of fever panic if questioned ("St. Churchill a monster!? The British Empire bad!? Elizabeth I, Henry V, the Kings and Queens and all those bloody dukes and priests, war mongers, killers and maniacs!? This won't do! You're anti-british, you hate your country! Protect the statues! Keep history locked in a led lined tomb forever!"). Britain is a nauseatingly stupid country locked in a state of permanent arrested development. The Greek myths in particular have a sway over our collective cultural imagination in the west to a degree that's impossible to understate. A whole generation of politicians considered it a staple of elite virtue signalling to spout references to the classics at every conceivable moment. In many ways, an active deconstruction of myths, and particularly the Greek ones, is good and needed. But there's not enough there to sustain a story, and hardly justifies the agonising 330 pages I had to slog through to finish it. 12 days on this is an embarrassment. I wasted nearly the whole of November on this above average mainstream book award crap.

Incidentally, the is the third book that I've read as part of a bookclub that sucked (along with Mexican Gothic and Neverwhere) with only My Year of Rest and Relaxation being a find I truly adored. Im starting to think book clubs are just vehicles to let other people inflict their sub normal reading appetites on other people, where the barrel scraping of shallow, mainstream, populist shit is just hewed up relentlessly. Blah. ...more

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