SEPTEMBER WRAP UP: What I Read This Month

Hi everyone! Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’ll be talking about the books I read in September. This month I read 4 books, 3 of which are classical novels. Here are my thoughts on all of them:

1. CLASSICS AND AMERICAN LITERATURE: Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville

What is Moby-Dick about? On the surface, Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville is an adventure story about a mad captain’s quest for revenge against a great white whale. The novel’s complexity, however, lies underneath the surface. Like the iceberg that sunk the Titanic, there is so much more to this novel than meets the eye. For starters, Moby-Dick is the ultimate allegory of obsession, ambition, and the hunt for meaning. We all have our white whales, and Melville gives us a crash course on self-awareness: how far am I willing to go in pursuit of this goal or objective? Sometimes, he says, morale tanks, good sense evaporates, the ship veers off course, and our very life is at stake.

Second, Moby-Dick celebrates the value of the weird and tangential. I mean, who hasn’t gone off on a tangent in the middle of a conversation before? I know I have, and Melville is no exception. He takes detours, long and nerdy detours, about whaling, whaling ships, whales, whale diet, whale etymology, whale zoology, whale migration, whale oil, whale biology, whale meat, whale skinning, and every other possible topic you can think about whales. These tangents don’t serve the plot of the novel, but they let Melville experiment in narrative voice and literary genre. Some of the chapters in Moby-Dick, for example, are dictionary entries, encyclopedia passages, sermons, soliloquies, dramas, and tales within tales… “Melville looks at the whale,” scholar Elizabeth Renker says, “with relish, from an exuberant assortment of literary angles, encompassing them all into one mighty compendium and in so doing breaking the boundaries of what it means to be a book.”

Finally, the whale is a personification of God, hence the whiteness of the whale, and the novel is a philosophical treaty on attempting and failing to comprehend the incomprehensible.

This book is considered today the 7^th greatest book of all time (www.thegreatestbooks.org) but the book sold less than 4,000 copies during Melville’s lifetime. It was actually out of print at the time of his death. Contemporary readers, however, really love it or really hate it. Someone who did not like it said, “I’d rather be harpooned, fall off my ship, get eaten by a great white shark, and then have the great white shark swallowed by a whale, then read this book ever again.” Me? There are several things in this novel that I would’ve liked to see more of; specifically, for example, Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg. However, the most important relationship in the book is that between Ahab and Moby-Dick, and we see very little of that too. Also, there is also a lot less action in the novel than you would’ve expected (sometimes the action is interrupted by chapters-long tangentials) and the entire novel is a build-up for the final encounter between Captain Ahab and his nemesis. If you delete all the tangential chapters, which has indeed been done in abridged versions of the novel,  the book is reduced significantly in size. However, the complexity, subtlety and depth of the novel is also severely hampered. I enjoyed and I am glad I read it, but it is not a favorite.

2. HISTORICAL FICTION AND MYTHOLOGY: The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

This book is a retelling of the death of Agamemnon, originally written by Aeschylus in the Orestia. The first play of the trilogy, Agamemnon, describes how Clytemnestra, his wife, murders him in revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia. Clytemnestra is the epitome of a vengeful, scheming plotter. She is also one of the most magnetic and fascinating figures in Greek mythology. That is why the myth of the death of Agamemnon, and her part in it, has been retold today by many modern writers. In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is “bloody, bold and resolute, a proud lioness, fiercely protective of her children. After the murder, she does not try to hide or run, but strides victoriously before her people, gore-stained ax in hand, declaring that justice has been served.” Clytemnestra isn’t the only woman in Greek mythology to lose a child, but she is the only one who chooses retaliation over grief. And this is what sets her apart from all of the women who have lost a child: she takes upon herself the traditional masculine role of avenger and judge of who should live and who should die (www.madelinemiller.com). 

For ten years, Clytemnestra plots her revenge. And when Agamemnon returns, it is she who leads him to the fateful bath. In some versions of the myth, it is Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover and Agamemnon’s cousin, who wields the ax. Aegisthus seeks his own vengeance: Agamemnon’s father killed his brothers. But in The Voyage Home by Pat Barker it is Clytemnestra who kills Agamemnon. After ten years, her grief and fury for the sacrifice and death of her daughter haven’t diminished. Barker’s Clytemnestra is fearless, duplicitous, clever, and driven by a calculating and furious desire for vengeance. She is quietly and fiercely resolved to settle the score.

Clytemnestra is above all a mother.  She maneuvers, in the chaos of the murder’s aftermath, to protect the throne for Orestes. This is why Clytemnestra kills Cassandra (who is pregnant) too. Cassandra’s death, however, is the most damning for Clytemnestra. Cassandra is notoriously the most silenced woman in literary history. She is condemned to foresee the destruction of her family and city, unable to do anything about it, and is violated in the temple of a goddess in the aftermath only to be handed over to Agamemnon as a prize concubine. Cassandra is more of an ally to Clytemnestra than an enemy, but to the Queen of Mycenae Cassandra is an intruder and a threat to her position as queen and, therefore, she must die.

Personally, I think that Clytemnestra is one of the most maligned women in Greek mythology. In the Odyssey, Homer states that Aegisthus killed Agamemnon, with the “help of my cursed wife”. In this epic, it is the man, not the woman, who commits the murder. And in describing his murderous wife, the ghost of Agamemnon says that “nothing is more grim or more shameless than a woman who sets her mind on such an unspeakable act as killing her husband […] she, with her mind set on stark horror, has shamed not only herself but all women to come, even the rare good one.” How much sympathy we have for this queen, however, depends on how we judge her husband, and Agamemnon isn’t an easy man to like, no matter what his ghost says to Odysseus in the Underworld. He is a vile, greedy and cowardly king; an adulterer and a womanizing husband, and an absent father. All in all, an absolute bastard. I agree with Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles,  when she says that Agamemnon had it coming (www.madelinemiller.com). After everything Agamemnon puts Clytemnestra through, after sacrificing their daughter and later supplanting her with a slave when he arrived to Mycenae from Troy with Cassandra in tow, is Clytemnestra simply supposed to accept it? I know that what was expected of women in Ancient Greece isn’t what women experience today, but I applaud the queen of Mycenae for not accepting it. Most revile her for doing that though. Like I said earlier, in this book Clytemnestra is fearless, duplicitous, clever, and driven by a calculating and furious desire for vengeance. However, why are these features applauded in men but abhorrent in women?

Despite Clytemnestra’s pivotal role in this myth,  she isn’t the main character of this novel. That is Cassandra, who arrives to Mycenae with her maid in tow. Ritsa, a secondary character in the previous two novels of this trilogy, The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, now takes center stage and narrates the story of how she came to be Cassandra’s “catch-fart” and companion. The relationship between these two women—Ritsa and Cassandra, who ultimately learn to love one another—is one of the best things of the novel. Ritsa is the only person that Cassandra can be her true self with and the only one who learns how to love her and understand her. Nonetheless, the plot of the novel is still centered on the impending death of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s revenge.

And this is an issue that I had with the previous two novels as well. This trilogy is marketed as a retelling that gives a voice to the women of Troy but I think that this is a bit misleading. In The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, the plot is centered around men. In The Voyage Home, the relationship between Ritsa and Cassandra is more prominent, yes, than the interactions of the women in the Greek camp that we saw in The Women of Troy, but in The Voyage Home too, the plot is still centered on the death of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s role in it.

3. CLASSICS AND FRENCH LITERATURE: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas is such a popular book that it needs no introduction. D’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos are iconic figures beyond literature that there is no need to explain who they are. Yet, I am conflicted. How can so many people love these characters when I didn’t see anything about them to like? I started this novel thinking that I was going to love it, but  that initial zeal and five-star potential that I saw at the beginning slowly dwindled the more I read and eventually finished the novel. I know that the story is set in a different time and place, but I found it hard to connect with any of the story’s main characters from the very beginning and I simply couldn’t root for any of them the further along into the story I got. All they do is drink, swindle, and seduce people for their own advantage. The author makes all the bad things these characters do seem excusable and justifiable as long as they are cloaked, quite cleverly, I might add, as brave and heroic deeds. But there is nothing brave and heroic about any of it. My opinion and respect for D’Artagnan, for example, was severely damaged when, claiming that he is irrevocably and madly in love with Constance, doesn’t think twice about pretending to be the Count de Wardes and coerce Milady into sleeping with him. But that’s not the only “brave and heroic” thing he does: If the husband—Constance’s husband—is stupid, then he deserves to be deceived; if the woman—Milady—is treacherous, it is a good deed to betray her, and if someone is stupid enough to be loyal to the Cardinal, it is perfectly fine to kill him. The musketeers are supposed to be an honorable institution, but there is nothing honorable about these four men. And I didn’t think any better about Monsieur de Treville, the leader of the Musketeers, who enables and protects them at every turn.

Needless to say, I didn’t like this book. Which is not surprising. After all, I did DNF The Count of Montecristo. Don’t think I’ll be picking any other Alexandre Dumas in a while.

4. CLASSICS AND ANCIENT LITERATURE: Odyssey by Homer, translated by Stanley Lombardo

The last book I read in September is Odyssey by Homer and translated by Stanley Lombardo. Truthfully, this is only the second time in my life that I read The Odyssey. If you compare this to the amount of times I have read The Iliad (at least 10), this is surprising. This translation, in my opinion, is a good option for those of us who have decided to pick it up again after so many years. Although, I admit, it wasn’t my first choice. That would’ve been Stephen Mitchell’s translation, but Lombardo’s translation does a superb job at making the original more accessible and readable to us modern readers as well. I said this before, in my review for this author’s translation of The Iliad, and I reiterate it here. This translation is the perfect starting point for those of us who haven’t read the Homer’s poem about Odysseus in a while or for first-time readers. In fact, I also tried to read Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey, back to back with Lombardo’s, and found that I couldn’t get into it so I DNF’d it. So, the translation does indeed make the reader. I recommend this book, but it is important to find the right translation for you. That will make all the difference in whether you like or don’t like this poem.

In my ranking of the best (for me) translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, Lombardo’s translation currently occupy the second tier. That may change later, but as of this writing, this translation is one of the best ones I have read thus far. This, however, may not be the case for you.

That is everything I read this month. Thank you for stopping by.