Rewriting the past as the present is irresistible, however dubious in scholarship and dangerous in politics; good for romances and poetry, then. This is both, the raucus, she-lad autobiography of a woman who grows up poor in Roman London, marries money, seduces an emperor, and dies for it. It balances the Penelopeia. This puts the least socially acceptable enthusiasms into rough, silly, vulgar, broken verse in several forms; that hid not just the unpopular but the confusing urges of Penelope, and smoothed it all into imitation Lattimore.
I like Evaristo's book a lot better, of course. The most startling subject is the visit to a gladiator fight, which heroine Zuleika has no anachronistic objections to. It's not that she doesn't think about the horror, but there's no Victorian in her at all, it is not her duty to be good. Slower, and less considered, and more smoothly jointed to modern behavior, is her attitude towards her slaves; not intentionally cruel, but completely selfish.
The macaroni combination of Latin and modern London-melting-pot White Teeth urban slang and proper academic freeform verse works better than I expected it to.
ISBN: 0142001716
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