A very good book
I've just read Alessandro Baricco's An Iliad, and it is the best book I've read in a very long time. A compacted version of the incidents of the same story (he originally wanted to perform a reading of the original, but realizing it would take 40 hours, started to make interventions), told from a variety of first-person viewpoints. Most notably, Baricco completely removes the gods (from material influence in the story, if not from the belief of the characters), and it is fascinating (as he notes in his preface) how Homer provides enough human agency that things might have turned out as they did even without the divine.
A wonderful take on an old story, followed by a meditation on war, on the seductive beauty of war, which a people hungry for peace cannot simply deny or ignore if they hope to defeat it: the trick, not yet achieved, is to provide a more compelling beauty as an alternative.
Thought-provoking, and very highly recommended.
A wonderful take on an old story, followed by a meditation on war, on the seductive beauty of war, which a people hungry for peace cannot simply deny or ignore if they hope to defeat it: the trick, not yet achieved, is to provide a more compelling beauty as an alternative.
Thought-provoking, and very highly recommended.