An oddity - a domestic feminist sequel to the Odyssey, told in the first person by Penelope, who takes her daughters to visit several respectable queens around the wine-dark seas, comparing weaving and medicinal gardens with them all.
It should, alas, have had a lot more conflict in it. Everyone - including Helen - has decided that the whole aberration of the elopement is best forgiven and forgotten. Arete is a respected wife and co-ruler, the Pythia is a besieged by a city gone lawless but is not herself terrifying.
But no gods, scant enchantments, and no sorceresses! (Possibly one god, who behaves rationally - out of character, that. Mentor appears, but not as Athene.) And really, if Penelope has a bone to pick with the the wider world, or a yen for powerful women's knowledge, Circe and Calypso and Medea would have been the people to visit. Instead we get an unlikely Penthesilea (not even properly dead although the dead do speak in the originals).
It was all right as a story of motherly midlife crisis, which is a good solid subject. But the logical universe it's in is a plains-easy version of the rocky, stormy, Classical Mediterranean, and that's a pity. I would have loved a big mess of the Women's Mysteries - I adore 's reworkings, and the techne of women's crafts. Aga Saga of the Aegean doesn't do justice to either the wild or the domestic.
The blank verse is recognizably in the style of . There are irruptions of modernity, especially in the interactions between characters; they're more reasonable and less emotional than 's characters, which leaves fewer places for rhetoric and poetry.
ISBN: 1-56792-206-6
So wrote clew in Poetry. | TrackBackInteresting. Are you familiar with Christa Wolf's Cassandra? As one might guess, it's the fall of Troy told from you-know-who's point of view, and absolutely excellent -- though no enchantments, I'm afraid, save for the wonderfully light touch of the framing device and the nice connection it makes to Wolf's four succeeding pieces in the same volume. Very well worth the read.
I remember Cassandra's knowing what the future held for Troy as sufficiently enchantment-like, in an unpleasant way. And didn't she spend a while imprisoned in a giant beeskep and hallucinating?
I read it more than ten years ago (!), and may have it confused entirely with something else.