- Hardcover: 128 pages
- Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (Feb 9 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312288840
- ISBN-13: 978-0312288846
- Product Dimensions: 19 x 13.5 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,274,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
With this brilliantly conceived retelling of the plight of one of Homer's heroes, British writer Cook demonstrates the same skill that has made her poetry and examinations of Renaissance literature so wonderfully memorable. Cleaving closely to the Odyssey but embellishing her tale with sharply imagined creative flourishes, Cook navigates the rise and fall of the powerful Greek warrior Achilles, tragic hero of the Trojan War. Voluptuously chronicling the warrior's youth, Cook tells how he is dipped in the immortalizing waters of the river Styx (except for the legendary heel) and spends his youth cloaked as a girl. As he rises to power, Achilles encounters a bevy of gods and mystical figures, each imparting ruminations on fate, mortality and the tragic eventualities of love and war. Death the slaying of Troy's champion soldier, Hector; the 12 gruesome days spent parading his corpse via chariot; and Achilles' own demise is the work's central theme, but Cook also brilliantly narrates a series of passionate encounters, describing, for example, the exquisitely athletic fusion of King Peleus and Achilles' sea-nymph mother, Thetis. Cook's text is more lush prose poem than traditional narrative, its concentrated, intense verbiage exhibiting agony and beauty simultaneously. The heady brew is made even richer by Cook's brave incorporation of an episode from the life of poet John Keats in the surprising final chapter, which suggests a curious affinity between the prophetic writer and the slain hero. At 128 pages, Cook's tale is tightly woven, and this brevity makes for an extreme reading experience. The genre of retellings of classical epics will surely be reinvigorated by this slim, exceptional interpretation of the heroic fable of Achilles. (Feb.)Forecast: Rave reviews in Britain heralded the appearance of this potent work, and curiosity on these shores should be whetted by the book's haunting jacket, which features a massive ancient wooden gate in stark black and white.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* With all the backstory and ongoing action in the Iliad, it is easy to forget the opening lines' pronouncement that the epic is about one man, Achilles, who, scorned by the Greek leader Agamemnon, is sitting out the war. But only Achilles can ensure Greek victory, only he can vanquish the Trojan champion Hector. Of course, after Hector slays Achilles' boon companion, Patroclus, the great hero does destroy Hector, only to be killed soon after by a divinely guided arrow. The matter of Troy continues without him. Cook opens her inspired retelling of Achilles' story with a proem on the conjunction of Styx, the underworld river of death, and a surface river, possibly Troy's Scamander but conceivably any stream that fosters life. She flashes forward to homebound Odysseus' encounter with Achilles in Hades, then unfurls his story, from his birth as the offspring of a goddess and a man, to his mother's vain attempt to hide him from his fate by dressing him as a girl, to the nine years he grew to manhood on the plain before Troy, to the events reported in the Iliad. In language more chaste and essential than prose fiction normally employs, Cook points up the primal quality of Achilles' story, so that we see its tragedy--that the supremely gifted, too, must die--as utterly universal. An Achilles or a Keats, as Cook argues by means of a coda about the great young hero of Romantic poetry, comes but once in an epoch to make us grasp our immortal glory and our mortal ignominy securely enough to celebrate as well as despair. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Two rivers. Flowing in contrary directions. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Two rivers. Flowing in contrary directions. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Immortality Is Best Known Through Mortality,
By
This review is from: Achilles: A Novel (Paperback)
This short novel is exquisitely lyrical in its depiction of how human frailties ultimately define the insatiable mortal longing for immortality. The poetic nature of the writing illustrates that mortal pains and struggles are transcendant in and of themselves and therefore define the immortality of the bold and adventurous spirit.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Poem about the hero,
By
This review is from: Achilles: A Novel (Paperback)
Elizabeth Cook's short novel is actually a poem, full of dream imagery of violence and eroticism. Ulysses draws Achilles up from Hades with a ditch of blood, from which he lures the dead like thirsty vampires. Thetis the ocean goddess makes love to the human (...) in a vast range of substance and form, from fire to lioness. Helen contemplates as the Greeks kill all Priam's family around her. Chiron the Centaur raises the mischievious boy Achilles, who trys to find his sheathed penis. Achilles bears down on Hector and then drags the body for 12 days, yet the body never deteriorates since it is favored by the gods. Priam begs for his son's body and Achilles emotionally moves to the point or stage where he can release the body of the man who killed his lover Patroclus. Elizabeth Cook washes the reader in dream image after image, making Achilles less real with each passage and more archtypal, residing in the unconscious.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful, thought-provoking book,
By
This review is from: Achilles: A Novel (Hardcover)
Written in the form of an ancient ballad, this book tells the story of brooding Achilles, from his conception by his mortal father and immortal mother, through his discovery of love, to the plains of Ilium, and on to the abode of Hades. And then, when the story seems to be over, it telescopes out to include those touched by Achilles story; Helen of Troy broods in her apartment; Chiron the centaur reexamines his life; and the poet Keats looks back on yesteryear.This is a wonderful, thought-provoking book. It does not retell the story of Achilles to make a modern point, nor does it seek to entertain by recasting the story as modern prose. Instead, this book presents a story, such as those told so long ago. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a great story.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
