Volume 53, Number 14 · September 21, 2006

The Hero's Wife Speaks

By Jasper Griffin
The Penelopiad
by Margaret Atwood

Canongate, 199 pp., $18.00

The Odyssey of Homer—far more than the darker and more comfortless Iliad—has been a book with great appeal. Readers, followers, and imitators have abounded. James Joyce's Ulysses is only one of the more elaborate and fantastic of its variants, along with the enormous and yet more fantastic Odyssey: A Modern Sequel of Nikos Kazantzakis. The Greeks themselves always ranked it below the Iliad; that was the Great Poem, but later generations have often disagreed with their verdict.



Review, 2027 words

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