The Penelopiad.

I am again at Starbucks, and again, it is so cold out.
How do stray animals, and stray people, stay alive out there?

Tonight I am thinking of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, a book I read just prior to Kundera’s Identity.
This book was sent to me as a gift, from a friend who is well aware of how much I love Margaret Atwood’s writing. Since I am such an avid fan, I realize my perception of this book may be a bit biased. It is just that I am now even more convinced that Atwood cannot help but continue to not write badly. [<-- Unlike that very sentence there!]
She is so good. And I loved this latest book of hers. It is part of the Myths Series, (initiated, I think, by Knopf) which will include books by various well-known authors, each focusing on a re-telling of some ancient myth. For instance, Jeanette Winterson has already completed one entitled Weight, the myth of Atlas and Heracles. And Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth is also already available.
This one by Margaret is a bit of a different slant on the myth of Penelope and Odysseus.
Other than watching The Simpsons fairly regularly, I know very little about Homer, so, as I picked up this book (unwrapped it really) I felt like... “D’oh! I am not gonna understand this thing!”
I have never read The Odyssey.
But the neat thing is, I found that you do not have to know much about The Odyssey in order to really enjoy this book. The brief Introduction itself furnishes enough background to get right into the midst of the story before you are finished even the first brief chapter.
Most readers will at least be familiar with the story of the beautiful Helen of Troy (Penelope’s cousin) and how she is finally liberated by Brad Pitt. Well, when Penelope’s husband Odysseus (reluctantly) leaves Ithaca to join in the fracas involving this Trojan War, he stays away for twenty years.
And Penelope is left behind, to tend to the affairs of state and the state of affairs.
During this time, men are pretty much crawling out of the woodwork to try and win her hand in marriage, everyone presuming that Odysseus is long since dead.
For decades, there is no word from him. Only legends, rumors, contradictory reports as to his whereabouts. It's the ultimate “he went out for a pack of smokes and I haven’t seen him since” story.
Penelope has always been lauded as the epitome of unwavering faithfulness, patiently waiting for Odysseus to return to her.
Drawing on material other than Homer’s Odyssey, Atwood has chosen to tell the story of this interim period from the perspective of Penelope herself. Along with this first-person story, Atwood has placed alternating sections where Penelope’s twelve maids share their story also. These twelve were hanged until dead by Odysseus and Telemachus (father and son) upon the former’s return to Ithaca.
From the narration standpoint, it is from start to finish a tale from beyond the grave, as Penelope tells us, in the opening sentence “Now that I’m dead I know everything.”

Atwood tells us in the Introduction that there are two questions which are raised (and unanswered) after anyone reads Homer’s Odyssey. These are: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?
She says, “The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids; and in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself.”

This little book pulls back the curtain on an important portion of mythic history.
No one can do it better than Margaret Atwood.

[T.yL.i.I.]

*********