Happy New Year!
I'll be spending the next week or two doing some housekeeping here on the blog. Finishing up CCC is first, I need to catch up on Star Wars Classics (I've still been reading, just not blogging), the rest of the (belated) weekly reflections, and then a couple overall reflection posts. I have a half dozen ideas for this year's reading kicking around, so I'll use the time to get the books I need and make some decisions.
But tonight I want to take a couple minutes to wrap up The Odyssey. I'm glad I reread it for several reasons. I think the last (and only) time I read it cover to cover before was probably high school. I read The Iliad one summer, liked it, and decided to follow it with The Odyssey. I think I had Fagles translations of both. I liked The Iliad a lot better, though I don't really remember why all these years later. I read excerpts in undergrad, and I teach a chunk or two most years in my own English classes. My stepdaughter is really into Epic: The Musical and I asked her if she wanted to read the book. She did, so we went to Barnes & Noble. She liked the idea of having a woman's translation, so she got Wilson. They only had one copy, so I decided to grab Fitzgerald as the sort of "standard." I haven't sat down and read the whole Wilson, but it seems pretty good. I definitely like them both more than I liked Fagles, but I might have enjoyed it more today (I will not be Casually Comparing Classics with The Odyssey anytime soon.) It was fun to look at passages and compare them, talk about how the musical was similar/different, etc. And then I used a VPN to get the last release two hours early so my wife wouldn't have to stay up until midnight, which she was very grateful for.
Mini-review, I guess: It's a fun story. It has it's weird bits and it's slow bits, but Homer's poetry (through Fitzgerald) is usually pretty zippy, and all the crazy stories are still interesting. I was genuinely excited every time I sat down to read it.
Besides the familial angle (which is very appropriate to the story) it was nice to sit down and read a whole classic cover to cover. It's been quite a while since I did that (the excerpts from 15MAD have been taking up most of my "serious" reading for the last year), and it's a good little mental muscle flex.
It was also good to actually (re)learn the story. I think most people with more than a passing interest in mythology, literature, etc. can give you some kind of summary of The Odyssey, but it's probably wrong. I think the cliché version is, "It's about a guy who tries to get home and fights monsters and goes on adventures along the way." And then I read the story and realizes that Odysseus doesn't even show up for the first quarter or so of the book, and actually makes it home around the half way point. So yeah, there's some decent adventuring and monstering in there, but it's really a small part of the book (and a lot of the stories only take up a page or two) and Odysseus spends a lot of chronological time (and page time) either captured or not actively trying to get home.
So what is it about? History's greatest idiot-genius/jerk protagonist? (Kidding, I've ranted about that enough already.) I'd say number one is how people and families move on after someone dies. Telemachus becoming a man to fill in for the (not) dead Odysseus. Penelope sorting through her grief and handling the suitors. On a more thematic level, it's about hospitality. Giving it, accepting it, abusing it. Xenia is a big deal, and it's really what drives the whole story. Odysseus would never have made it home without the hospitality of some of the people he met along the way, and he's delayed primarily by "corrupt" versions of hospitality (bewitching and hostage-holding). Telemachus is only able to find out about his father due to the hospitality from Odysseus's old comrades. The suitors abuse Penelope's hospitality (and get slaughtered for it.) The most famous story in the whole book is probably the Polyphemus encounter, where the cyclops is very bad at hospitality. Odysseus and co. being bad guests on Helios's island a bit later is also a pivotal moment.
From a historical perspective (besides all the mythology goodies) it's also cool to see the story that arguably lays down the template for the adventure/romance story. World travels, monsters and gods, reunited lovers! There were stories and epics before The Odyssey, but they're either disjointed (or incomplete) or less complex.
I guess the last thing I learned from this (and unfortunately am stuck with for the blog in general for a bit) is that I shouldn't try to write these entries too long after having read the book. I plowed through most of it months ago, but I obviously didn't keep up on the entries. Even with rereading, the last few aren't nearly as good without the story fresh in my mind and fully contextualized. I'll do better next time.
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