I first read the Odyssey at university. I was surprised by how much I loved it considering how old and how blokey it was (blood, war, boys being boys) – not to mention the fact it is 12,109 lines of epic poetry.
It’s a story about coming home (too soon?), following Odysseus and his men as they try to get back to the island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. Credited to Homer, the tale features men, monsters and gods. At around 3,000 years old, it remains a ripping yarn that many have tried their hand at adapting or expanding.
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood stays true to the epic poetry form while giving voice and agency to Odysseus’s long-suffering wife Penelope and her chorus of maidens as they wait on Ithaca for him to return.
Circe by Madeleine Miller is another brilliant book in the same ilk that expands the tale of the goddess who becomes Odysseus’s lover and guide home. More recently, Ralph Fiennes skilfully turned his hand to playing a fittingly sinewy Odysseus (he’s a ripped warrior but he is nearly 50 and has been away from proper food for a while) in The Return, which focuses on the climactic conclusion to Homer’s epic tale.
Director Christopher Nolan has now taken on the epic and is receiving rave reviews. I will be seeing it this weekend for sure and am ready to be blown away by what critics are calling a masterpiece that harks back to the epics of old Hollywood.
While you can expect myth and magic with a story that sees gods changing the winds, cyclops attacks and men becoming pigs, the land and sea across which Odysseus sails is real. In this piece, Pragya Agarawal, explores how ancient geographers and modern researchers have traced Odysseus’s travels. As she notes, the journey home is what grounds this tale and this piece has got me very excited to see how Nolan has depicted that.
Family expectations
Pragya is an expert not just in the history of cartography, but also in gender inequality, feminism, racism and reproductive justice. So when I heard about a novel centred on a woman discovering that marriage, motherhood and doing everything “right” hadn’t brought the life she expected, I knew I wanted Pragya to review it.
First House opens with its unnamed narrator being told by her husband that he wants a divorce. She can’t believe it: marriage is hard, she tells herself, but you endure it – that’s what her parents did. As Avni Doshi’s protagonist falls apart and rebuilds herself, the identity she’d worked so hard to create dissolves, forcing her to confront the possibility that the life she’d been praised for wasn’t the one she truly wanted.
First House explores the pressures of culture, family, society and personal myth-making, asking what we deny ourselves by clinging to expectations and inherited ideas of success. Is it possible not to want children even if you have them? What is marriage for? I devoured this book, and Pragya found it a refreshing, deeply contemporary feminist tale.
First House by Avni Doshi is out now
Read more:
First House: a visceral story about the collapse of a ‘perfect’ life and the imagining of a new one
Another story about family ties and inherited debts, is Shannon Sanders’ debut novel The Great Wherever. After inheriting a share of her family’s Tennessee farm, Aubrey travels south hoping to solve her financial problems. What she finds is her inheritance is highly contested and within its walls lies generations of family secrets, watched over by the ghosts of her ancestors. The house was bought by her great-grandfather, one of the first Black landowners in the community, and sits on the land on which her family was once enslaved.
Spanning decades of Black American history, The Great Wherever is a sweeping story about land, inheritance, race and generational wealth, asking how much we owe the past. In this piece, expert in American literature Sharon Monteith explores how the novel uses the voices of ancestors to illuminate the history of African American dispossession, inheritance and resilience. The result is a moving reflection on memory, legacy and the enduring importance of land in Black American history.
The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders is out now
Marie Maitland
Most people know Anne Lister as “Gentleman Jack” and regard her as the “first modern lesbian”. However, centuries earlier another remarkable woman was writing about love between women.
Marie Maitland, a 16th-century Scottish gentlewoman, was an unmarried, well-educated and financially independent. For centuries, she has been acknowledged as the author of the Maitland Quarto manuscript, which is a significant collection of poetry in Scots from 1586.
Poem 49 in the manuscript is a lyrical exploration of one woman’s romantic desire for another. It is this poem that sits at the heart of historian and translator Ashley Douglas’s new book, With My Own Hand: The Secret Life of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s Sixteenth Century Sappho.
Drawing on a host of recently discovered historical records, the book tells the fascinating story of Maitland and her manuscript in the hopes of placing her back into history. As our reviewer, English scholar Dianne Watt writes, the book is a “thoughtful and often speculative reconstruction of this early modern woman’s queer life”.
With My Own Hand: The Secret Life of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s Sixteenth Century Sappho by Asheley Douglas is out now
Read more:
The 16th-century lesbian poet who could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack
While getting my hair cut this week I noticed that for the hour or so I had been in the chair the same artist had been on repeat on the speakers. My toes were tapping beneath the sweeping salon cape and I had to ask who it was. To my surprise it was Madonna. Yes, Madge is back and she is once again putting out bangers.
Confessions II is a return to the dancefloor, but it’s not just full of earworms with surface-level lyrics about hedonism. Our reviewer argues that beneath the house beats and club nostalgia lies Madonna’s most vulnerable songwriting yet, with lyrics reflecting on grief, family, ageing and past relationships. Rather than simply revisiting an old sound, Confessions II reveals an artist willing to confront her own fallibility while reaffirming her place as one of pop’s great innovators.
Confessions II is out now
Read more:
Confessions II: a euphoric return to form that reveals a more vulnerable Madonna
