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bloodygranuaile) wrote2024-06-05 11:07 am
bloodygranuaile) wrote2024-06-05 11:07 am
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The life of a witch
I remember Madeline Miller’s Circe making a bit of a splash when it was released in 2018 or so, and last year I snagged a copy off a friend. I put this squarely in the category of summer reading because of its relation to The Odyssey which is also summer reading, and now it is (basically) summer!
I must preface my review by disclosing that I think I’m about as much the target audience for this book as you can get. A solitary witch living on her own island in a sumptuous house that magically only requires as much domestic caretaking as she feels like doing? The dream. A wide-ranging tour through all of the most well-known Greek mythology, putting an Adult perspective on all the childhood favorites of a former D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths girlie? Easy fun and I get to feel well-read at the same time even though I ain’t. Lots of court intrigue and vengeance and murder and turning men into pigs, but it’s definitely all because our first-person narrator is the only immortal in the Greek pantheon with any impulse toward a moral compass? Self-indulgent but delicious, like a six-dollar scoop of ice cream.
The book isn’t written in the style of like, a picaresque romp through Greek Mythology; it is a much more seriously approached imagined biography of Circe, daughter of Helios, from her childhood as an affection-starved and neglected nymph in the subterranean halls of her father, through her exile to the island of Aiaia for witchcraft, to the end of the Greek age. In this time she has a couple attempted and actual love affairs, gets roped into all sorts of completely insane drama around her siblings (including her sister Pasiphae’s bearing of the Minotaur), has a child, deals with some monsters of both the shitty men and the mythological variety, and generally does immortal witchy shenanigans. At various points she faces off against such powerful figures as Helios, Hermes, Athena, and the guardian of the deep Trygon, and defies the order of Zeus to have a civil conversation with Prometheus. The plot is pretty episodic, given that it covers centuries, but it all does more or less congeal into the trajectory of a life, if a very long one.
The end of the book veers pretty far off from what I understand of Greek mythology, but in a way I thought was pretty interesting–Miller’s versions of Penelope and Telemachus go to some places that I would certainly not have expected from reading The Odyssey, but Circe is its own novel and I think it works.
I must preface my review by disclosing that I think I’m about as much the target audience for this book as you can get. A solitary witch living on her own island in a sumptuous house that magically only requires as much domestic caretaking as she feels like doing? The dream. A wide-ranging tour through all of the most well-known Greek mythology, putting an Adult perspective on all the childhood favorites of a former D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths girlie? Easy fun and I get to feel well-read at the same time even though I ain’t. Lots of court intrigue and vengeance and murder and turning men into pigs, but it’s definitely all because our first-person narrator is the only immortal in the Greek pantheon with any impulse toward a moral compass? Self-indulgent but delicious, like a six-dollar scoop of ice cream.
The book isn’t written in the style of like, a picaresque romp through Greek Mythology; it is a much more seriously approached imagined biography of Circe, daughter of Helios, from her childhood as an affection-starved and neglected nymph in the subterranean halls of her father, through her exile to the island of Aiaia for witchcraft, to the end of the Greek age. In this time she has a couple attempted and actual love affairs, gets roped into all sorts of completely insane drama around her siblings (including her sister Pasiphae’s bearing of the Minotaur), has a child, deals with some monsters of both the shitty men and the mythological variety, and generally does immortal witchy shenanigans. At various points she faces off against such powerful figures as Helios, Hermes, Athena, and the guardian of the deep Trygon, and defies the order of Zeus to have a civil conversation with Prometheus. The plot is pretty episodic, given that it covers centuries, but it all does more or less congeal into the trajectory of a life, if a very long one.
The end of the book veers pretty far off from what I understand of Greek mythology, but in a way I thought was pretty interesting–Miller’s versions of Penelope and Telemachus go to some places that I would certainly not have expected from reading The Odyssey, but Circe is its own novel and I think it works.