LitPicks - Aug '08 

Uses of Mythology: We draw on mythology, stories that tell us where we came from and where we will go, to frame life events, our own and others'. Populated with heroes and heroines, deities and monsters, mythology interweaves the supernatural with mortal life, offering an endless pattern of human behavior.

A Lighter Touch | Wonderfully Written | Great Works   



Mythology
Edith Hamilton, 1942
512 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
What's not to love about mythology? Deities and mortals loving and torment-ing one another; heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses surpassing the limits of human strentgh and beauty but caught in the trap of human passion. It's all loyalty and treachery, bravery and cowardness playing out over and over and over—it's the stuff of life!

I've loved Edith Hamilton ever since I came across her as a young reader— and I'm hardly alone. For more than 65 years, this book has been treasured by students and teachers of mythology—it's a classic in its own right.

In plain, unadorned prose (at times clunky), Hamilton lays out the Greek myths in all their shimmering mysteriousness. She introduces us to the gods, the creation of the world, the earliest heroes, tales of love (or lust), and tales of daring.

Why bother with mythology? First of all, it's fun! But, second, its themes and narratives echo throughout literature, even down to very recent works like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Philip Roth's The Human Stain (see below). Understanding their mythical underpinnings deepens our enjoyment of those novels.

As a book club, you might try something different: have members each read a different section of Hamilton...then report back to the group. Or everyone read the entire work...with each member choosing a favorite myth for discussion, one with personal resonance.

However you decide to handle this book, do read "The Trojan War" and "The Fall of Troy" (Part 4, Chapters I and II). Also, read "The House of Atreus" (Part 5, Chapter I). But don't stop there!

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The Human Stain
Philip Roth, 2000
384 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
On page 4, the protagonist of Roth's novel, a classics professor, asks his students:

You know how European literature begins?... With a quarrel. All of European literature springs from a fight.... Agamemnon, King of men, and great Achilles. And what are they quarreling about these two violent, mighty souls? It's as basic as a barroom brawl. They are quarreling over a woman.

And there you have The Iliad (see below), whose characters and raw passions Roth overlays onto a story that takes place some 3,000 years after Troy in the town of Athena, Massachusetts. And those two stories are jammed up right up against the story of Bill and Monica in the White House in the summer of 1998. Boy oh boy—buckle your seatbelts!

The hero /classics professor is 71-year-old Coleman Silk, who after a distinguised career trips up over a supposed racial epithet, is disgraced, and resigns in high dudgeon. His wife Iris dies from a stroke, perhaps from all the stress—and as Coleman shouts to anyone who will listen: "they went after me but killed my wife." Then Coleman meets Faunia (Faun, a wild creature of the woodlands, half goat/ half human.), a beautiful janitoress, battered and bruised from her 37-years-of-life—and the two are stalked by Achilles: her Vietnam-warrior ex-husband.

In this work, everyone has a deep background, which Roth painstakingly draws out for us, and many have something to hide. Few are who they seem to be. As the narrator tells us, we can know nothing for sure—life is far too uncertain and mysterious.

The Human Stain ponders the limits of language and logic; it pits human rationality against our primal natures. And as the title suggests, it is about the devastation we humans leave in our wake, on both the grand scale and the small and personal. It's intelligent, powerful, and with Roth's gorgeous prose—one of the best reads ever. Dense prose and long digressions, yes, but hard to put down and hard to end.

See The Human Stain Reading Group Guide.

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The Iliad
Homer; Robert Fagels, Trans., 1990
704 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
If it weren't for this great translation by Robert Fagels, I probably wouldn't recommend The Iliad as a book club read. Okay, being honest here: I probably wouldn't have read it myself!

But Fagels' writing is so incredibly clear and potent and understandable you find yourself enthralled, caught up in a dreamlike world of gods and mortals. This is the grand epic of all time. As Coleman Silk (above) puts it, it's the beginning of all European literature.

The Iliad is the story the Greek invasion of Ilion (Troy) in what is now Turkey. The reason for the invastion: to reclaim the wife of Sparta's King Menelaus, Helen, the beauty who ran off with Paris, prince of Troy (she whose face launched 1,000 ships). The Iliad is only about a small portion of the 10-year-long war, but many of the most famous heroes take part: Odysseus, Ajax, Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, and Paris himself.

And then there are the gods, sitting high on Olympus, taking sides in the human drama below and intervening behind Zeus's back on behalf of their favorite heroes. They squabble, insult one another, seduce and trick one another...and generally behave like a band of juvenile delinquents. It's "high" comic relief from the human savagery taking place on the ground below.

Contrary to popular belief, The Iliad does not glorify war; over and over Homer points out its horrific cost—and Achilles, the greatest of warriors, questions its very meaning. What the epic does is to glorify the men and women caught up in the conflagration—their bravery, loyalty to comrades, their sorrow and despair, all in face of war's brutality.

So...how to approach this work? Split it up into 2 or 3 sessions. Then find an English or classics professor to work with you, to point out the on-going motifs, themes, philosophical underpinnngs, and cultural traditions. It's not hard...there's so much within its pages... and it's so much fun.

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