I'm going to be bouncing back and forth between reading, research, and some serious baking; but I'll be checking in here at least every hour or so, and trying to post a lot to get the ball rolling. I'll be finishing up some more chapter summaries -- I know it shouldn't be taking quite so many postings to sum up a single book of the Odyssey, but it's been a crazy week and I've only had time to write late at night, so I've just been typing until my eyes start to shut of their own accord and then I call it a day.
I am reading the Fagles translation of The Odyssey, and am on page 152, which is the beginning of Book Five, where Odysseus, the alleged main character of this story, will finally be making a real appearance! Woohoo!
As I read, I'm struck by the paradox one always encounters when reading ancient Greek literature -- there is at once that sense of immediacy and familiarity, and at the same time, this is all incredibly distant and foreign.
Odysseus is in many ways a modern hero to us -- he's an individual struggling to make his own way against a hostile world; he relies as much on cleverness as on bodily strength; he longs to be home with his beloved wife and son.
At the same time, he's incredibly antithetical to all we believe in and admire. He thinks nothing of committing what we would consider acts of unfaithfulness toward his wife; he sees no contradiction between longing to be home with her and tarrying a year with Circe (and though I haven't gotten to that chapter yet, if memory serves those two went *way* past second base). On returning home, he is furious at the suitors and how they have treated his family and household. But he's coming back from conquering Troy, which entailed routinely sacking a lot of innocent people's homeland, killing all the male inhabitants right down to the infant boy children, and enslaving the women and girl children.
Strange, and disturbing. But a compelling story, nonetheless.
