Circe

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read. It sets a new non-misogynistic standard for myth telling.

‍

What I might have said in return, I do not know. A distant shout floated up the corridor. “It is time for you to go now. Allecto does not like to leave me for long. Her cruelty springs fast as weeds and must any moment be cut again.” It was a strange way to put it, for he was the one who would be cut. But I liked it, as if his words were a secret. A thing that looked like a stone, but inside was a seed.

‍

Madeline Miller gathered all the references she could find about Circe and brought her to life in a way that gives context and meaning to what we’ve previously read about the nymph-goddess.

‍

Ordinarily, women in epics are tertiary characters. They are either vessels of children, evil entities with terrible powers that heroes must kill or go around, or they are gift-bearing goddesses. But this telling shows the arc of Circe's personality. It follows her from being a child at the foot of her father Helios, through her younger days of dubious decision making, to her exile, to the discovery of her own formidable power, to the choices she makes as a centuries-old goddess.

‍

After I changed a crew, I would watch them scrabbling and crying in the sty, falling over each other, stupid with their horror. They hated it all, their newly voluptuous flesh, their delicate split trotters, their swollen bellies dragging in the earth’s muck. It was a humiliation, a debasement. They were sick with longing for their hands, those appendages men use to mitigate the world.

‍

This book centers her in her own story. It shows how women who seek to find themselves and their power must create space between themselves and the greater world that, even in today’s modern society, doesn’t approve of self-determined women who want to go their own way. It shows that even if we are born into circumstances that deny us agency and power, we are often able to create our own based on the situations we live through and sheer willpower.

‍

LATER, YEARS LATER, I would hear a song made of our meeting. The boy who sang it was unskilled, missing notes more often than he hit, yet the sweet music of the verses shone through his mangling. I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

‍

I never wanted this book to end. It’s extremely well-written. Much of the prose is like poetry, but it’s also an action packed page-turner with one adventure after the next.

‍

It pulls together stories we may have read as kids (like the Odyssey) and stories we may have seen on television (like Jason and the Argonauts) and makes them personal. I absolutely loved this book.

‍

Outside, the seasons had turned. The sky opened its hands, and the earth swelled to meet it. The light poured thickly down, coating us in gold.

‍

Wholeheartedly recommended!

‍