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3.46 AVERAGE
3.46 AVERAGE
medium-paced
Byatt, Antonia S. (2011). Ragnarok: the End of the Gods. Edinburgh: Canongate. 2011. ISBN 9781847679659. Pagine 193. 5,99 €
La lettura di questo libro è la conseguenza diretta della lettura di The Ocean at the End of the Lane di Neil Gaiman. Al termine della recensione di Antonia S. Byatt (The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman – review) sul Guardian, il giornale rinviava a questo libro, che ho subito comprato e letto.
Non sono un tifoso sfegatato di Antonia Byatt: ho letto Possession, naturalmente, che mi è piaciuto senza entusiasmarmi e soprattutto senza farmi venire la voglia di leggere altri suoi romanzi. Quando un paio d’anno fa mia moglie ha finito di leggere The Children’s Book e me l’ha raccomandato, non ho voluto seguire il suo consiglio, spaventato anche dalle quasi 900 pagine.
Ma anche se non sono un tifoso sfegatato di Antonia Byatt, sono comunque un wagneriano sfegatato, e una rilettura dei miti norreni non me la potevo lasciare scappare: perché il Ragnarok è il crepuscolo degli dei, non la quarta giornata dell’Anello del Nibelungo, ma proprio il crollo del Pantheon nordico.
Antonia Byatt adotta un trucco vecchio come la letteratura (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Le mille e una notte, …): il racconto dei miti nordici viene filtrato attraverso la sensibilità di una bambina magra sfollata nella campagna inglese durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, che legge Asgard and the Gods; the tales and traditions of our Northern ancestors, forming a complete manual of Norse mythology di Wilhelm Wagner (non un parente di Richard).
wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
Spiccano alcuni aspetti che mi sembrano però (per quel che poco che ne so) tipici dello stile, e prima ancora del modo di essere, di Antonia Byatt:
La sensibilità verso il modo infantile e, per quanto esile sia la figura della bambina magra, questo è un punto in comune con l’io narrante di The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Un vocabolario ricchissimo e preciso, che mi pare essere una cifra (come direbbero i critici veri) della scrittora di Antonia Byatt. Anche se, a volte, i lunghi elenchi di piante, fiori, pesci, uccelli e creature varie sfocia decisamente nella tassonomia barocca.
Una grande attenzione ai temi dell’esaurimento delle risorse ambientali, tema molto insistito e ripreso nel capitolo finale (Thoughts on myth); tema che invece a me lascia freddissimo.
Un’originalissima lettura di Loki come dio della razionalità e dello studio del caos. Anch’io, come Antonia Byatt, adoro Loge/Loki da quando l’ho incontrato in Wagner e – pur sapendo che figlio di puttana sia – riconosco che in me convivono aspetti dell’uomo d’ordine Wotan, il mago legislatore e garante del buon funzionamento dell’universo, e aspetti dello sparigliatore Loge, il dio schumpeteriano della distruzione creativa.
* * *
Partiamo da un approfondimento della figura di Loki, come emerge dalle pagine di Antonia Byatt (consueti riferimenti alla posizione Kindle):
The gods needed him because he was clever, because he solved problems. When they needed to break bargains they had rashly made, mostly with giants, Loki showed them the way out. He was the god of endings. He provided resolutions for stories – if he chose to. The endings he made often led to more problems.
There are no altars to Loki, no standing stones, he had no cult. In myths he was the third of the trio, Odin, Hodur, Loki. In myths, the most important comes first of three. But in fairy tales, and folklore, where these three gods also play their parts, the rule of three is different; the important player is the third, the youngest son, Loki. [364-367]
[…] Loki her father whose form was hard to remember, even for her, since it changed subtly not only from day to day but from moment to moment. [519]
Odin had acquired knowledge in danger and pain, and at the cost of an eye. Odin’s knowledge was the knowledge of the forces that bound things together, and of the runes that read and controlled those forces.
[…]
Odin controlled magic, a form of knowledge that controlled things and creatures, including the societies of gods and men.
[…]
Loki was interested in things because he was interested in them, and in the way they were in the world, and worked in the world.
[…]
A sacrificed man was a cross, a simplified tree. A lung, a brain, was complexity run wild, an unholy mess in which a different kind of order might nevertheless be discerned [913-916-920-926]
As a child I had always sympathised with Loki, because he was a clever outsider. When I came to write this tale I realised that Loki was interested in Chaos – his stories contain flames and waterfalls, the formless things inside which chaos theorists perceive order inside disorder. He is interested in the order in destruction and the destruction in order. If I were writing an allegory he would be the detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration. [1311]
* * *
Qualche altra citazione:
[…] he had put the humans in their place and had told them to keep their place and not to eat the knowledge of good and evil. The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. [183]
[…] out of sight and inside the head. [419: detto dei lupi del mito]
And the dwarves made a supple skein from unthings. There were six, woven together: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird. The thing was light as air and smooth as silk, a long, delicate ribbon. [464]
The gods of Asgard were punished because they and their world were bad. Not clever enough, and bad. [999]
Courage became endurance, and soup was needed too much to be fed to the dying. [1031]
There are two ways, in stories, of winning battles – to be supremely strong, or to be a gallant forlorn hope. The Ases were neither. They were brave and tarnished. [1072]
[…] became ash amongst the falling ash. [1119: troppo facile, signora mia. Shame on you! Vergogna!]
The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered. [1131]
[…] the black undifferentiated surface, under a black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things. [1188]
[…] Deryck Cooke, in his splendid study of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, I Saw the World End […] [1307: subito ordinato]
La lettura di questo libro è la conseguenza diretta della lettura di The Ocean at the End of the Lane di Neil Gaiman. Al termine della recensione di Antonia S. Byatt (The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman – review) sul Guardian, il giornale rinviava a questo libro, che ho subito comprato e letto.
Non sono un tifoso sfegatato di Antonia Byatt: ho letto Possession, naturalmente, che mi è piaciuto senza entusiasmarmi e soprattutto senza farmi venire la voglia di leggere altri suoi romanzi. Quando un paio d’anno fa mia moglie ha finito di leggere The Children’s Book e me l’ha raccomandato, non ho voluto seguire il suo consiglio, spaventato anche dalle quasi 900 pagine.
Ma anche se non sono un tifoso sfegatato di Antonia Byatt, sono comunque un wagneriano sfegatato, e una rilettura dei miti norreni non me la potevo lasciare scappare: perché il Ragnarok è il crepuscolo degli dei, non la quarta giornata dell’Anello del Nibelungo, ma proprio il crollo del Pantheon nordico.
Antonia Byatt adotta un trucco vecchio come la letteratura (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Le mille e una notte, …): il racconto dei miti nordici viene filtrato attraverso la sensibilità di una bambina magra sfollata nella campagna inglese durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, che legge Asgard and the Gods; the tales and traditions of our Northern ancestors, forming a complete manual of Norse mythology di Wilhelm Wagner (non un parente di Richard).
wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
Spiccano alcuni aspetti che mi sembrano però (per quel che poco che ne so) tipici dello stile, e prima ancora del modo di essere, di Antonia Byatt:
La sensibilità verso il modo infantile e, per quanto esile sia la figura della bambina magra, questo è un punto in comune con l’io narrante di The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Un vocabolario ricchissimo e preciso, che mi pare essere una cifra (come direbbero i critici veri) della scrittora di Antonia Byatt. Anche se, a volte, i lunghi elenchi di piante, fiori, pesci, uccelli e creature varie sfocia decisamente nella tassonomia barocca.
Una grande attenzione ai temi dell’esaurimento delle risorse ambientali, tema molto insistito e ripreso nel capitolo finale (Thoughts on myth); tema che invece a me lascia freddissimo.
Un’originalissima lettura di Loki come dio della razionalità e dello studio del caos. Anch’io, come Antonia Byatt, adoro Loge/Loki da quando l’ho incontrato in Wagner e – pur sapendo che figlio di puttana sia – riconosco che in me convivono aspetti dell’uomo d’ordine Wotan, il mago legislatore e garante del buon funzionamento dell’universo, e aspetti dello sparigliatore Loge, il dio schumpeteriano della distruzione creativa.
* * *
Partiamo da un approfondimento della figura di Loki, come emerge dalle pagine di Antonia Byatt (consueti riferimenti alla posizione Kindle):
The gods needed him because he was clever, because he solved problems. When they needed to break bargains they had rashly made, mostly with giants, Loki showed them the way out. He was the god of endings. He provided resolutions for stories – if he chose to. The endings he made often led to more problems.
There are no altars to Loki, no standing stones, he had no cult. In myths he was the third of the trio, Odin, Hodur, Loki. In myths, the most important comes first of three. But in fairy tales, and folklore, where these three gods also play their parts, the rule of three is different; the important player is the third, the youngest son, Loki. [364-367]
[…] Loki her father whose form was hard to remember, even for her, since it changed subtly not only from day to day but from moment to moment. [519]
Odin had acquired knowledge in danger and pain, and at the cost of an eye. Odin’s knowledge was the knowledge of the forces that bound things together, and of the runes that read and controlled those forces.
[…]
Odin controlled magic, a form of knowledge that controlled things and creatures, including the societies of gods and men.
[…]
Loki was interested in things because he was interested in them, and in the way they were in the world, and worked in the world.
[…]
A sacrificed man was a cross, a simplified tree. A lung, a brain, was complexity run wild, an unholy mess in which a different kind of order might nevertheless be discerned [913-916-920-926]
As a child I had always sympathised with Loki, because he was a clever outsider. When I came to write this tale I realised that Loki was interested in Chaos – his stories contain flames and waterfalls, the formless things inside which chaos theorists perceive order inside disorder. He is interested in the order in destruction and the destruction in order. If I were writing an allegory he would be the detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration. [1311]
* * *
Qualche altra citazione:
[…] he had put the humans in their place and had told them to keep their place and not to eat the knowledge of good and evil. The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. [183]
[…] out of sight and inside the head. [419: detto dei lupi del mito]
And the dwarves made a supple skein from unthings. There were six, woven together: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird. The thing was light as air and smooth as silk, a long, delicate ribbon. [464]
The gods of Asgard were punished because they and their world were bad. Not clever enough, and bad. [999]
Courage became endurance, and soup was needed too much to be fed to the dying. [1031]
There are two ways, in stories, of winning battles – to be supremely strong, or to be a gallant forlorn hope. The Ases were neither. They were brave and tarnished. [1072]
[…] became ash amongst the falling ash. [1119: troppo facile, signora mia. Shame on you! Vergogna!]
The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered. [1131]
[…] the black undifferentiated surface, under a black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things. [1188]
[…] Deryck Cooke, in his splendid study of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, I Saw the World End […] [1307: subito ordinato]
Disclaimer: I am biased for A.S. Byatt because she wrote one of my favorite books.
This short book is a re-telling of the Norse myth of Ragnorok, i.e. the epic battle that leads to the end of the Norse gods. The reader is introduced to the myth through the eyes of "the thin girl" who is simultaneously reading and synthesizing the myths and the gods while sequestered in the country due to the evacuation of London during the Blitz. This is the basic premise of the book, with the parallels between wartime and the violence of the myths being both subtly suggested and undermined. There's not much of a story here, but what I love Byatt for is her language. She writes some of the most beautiful, lyrical prose that I have ever read - even when she's just listing things, it still seems to flow. Also, Byatt's brief dissection of myths and discussion of myths vs. fairy tales at the end of the book was very interesting and brought up some subtleties that I had never thought of before.
This short book is a re-telling of the Norse myth of Ragnorok, i.e. the epic battle that leads to the end of the Norse gods. The reader is introduced to the myth through the eyes of "the thin girl" who is simultaneously reading and synthesizing the myths and the gods while sequestered in the country due to the evacuation of London during the Blitz. This is the basic premise of the book, with the parallels between wartime and the violence of the myths being both subtly suggested and undermined. There's not much of a story here, but what I love Byatt for is her language. She writes some of the most beautiful, lyrical prose that I have ever read - even when she's just listing things, it still seems to flow. Also, Byatt's brief dissection of myths and discussion of myths vs. fairy tales at the end of the book was very interesting and brought up some subtleties that I had never thought of before.
If you’re interested in Norse mythology, and know it well enough to want to read about it through the eyes of someone seeing it through the eyes of an imagined child reading it in wartime England, then this is the book for you. If, like me, you find mythology generally uninteresting, and Norse mythology more impenetrable than most, you may also be delighted by the first page or so and then find yourself grinding through the next 180. It is a small work, so it has that going for it. And the parts where you’re with the narrator, “the thin girl”, are touching, beautiful; the words feel at times to have been conjured out of the air, ordered and organised as if by a conductor who with the lightest of touches directs our attention, our emotion, one way and another with an effortless wave of the hand. And then there’s the Norse mythology. That, after all, is what the project is about, so it’s largely unavoidable. Mythology is not about narrative, it’s about symbols, cultural Deep Structure and all that, so it never fits easily into a narrative frame. Mythology seems to consist predominantly in lists of things, interspersed with the occasional incomprehensibly irrational bit of action. A bit like walking through a gallery where the walls are lined with shopping lists or the names of molecular compounds, and every thousand feet or so, there’s a Dali-Bosch mashup: a child emerging from a yoghurt head or dark night sky inside a skull inside a wolf impaled on a rock with a spear. I suppose that’s the point really. This is this author’s attempt to paint a coherent picture of her own childhood encounter with, her appreciation and assimilation of, these stories. And she does it wonderfully. She shows the stories threading their subtle way through the reader’s life, both in the kind of expected war-time allegory, but more interestingly in the residue with which these tales colour ideas and experiences the reader subsequently will encounter. There are definite elements here that seem to preview a more contemporary anxiety about our ecological end-times, that for the adult thin child might mirror or be structured by these tales. The book ends with a chilling echo of the irredeemable pessimism of our age: “the black undifferentiated surface, under a black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things.”
Byatt's narrative voice is extraordinary. Also stricking is the peculiar spirit that permeates her stories with a coldness and austere truth that makes me uncomfortable, yet fascinated. And how she writes! There are few writers in our time and age who can equal her talent.
I have one word for this.
Dry.
I D.N.F.ed this book halfway through after 3 months.
Dry.
I D.N.F.ed this book halfway through after 3 months.
This is a modern re-telling of the Norse myths, but to me it was too academic in the myth telling, against the background story of Byatt's wartime childhood.
This book was a Christmas present from three years ago that I had not yet got around to reading. It entriged me because of the links between modern warfare and myth that are alluded to in the reviews. I got nothing that I expected from this book but that isn't in this case a bad thing.
Byatt's prose is captivating and so visceral I felt like I could touch the Norse world I became immersed within. It is a text that would benefit from reading aloud to hear the harsh fricative sounds laced throughout Byatt's writing.
What surprised me most about this book was that I enjoyed reading Byatt's commentary about it more than the myth itself. It made me feel more secure that I was meant to find the gods lacking in personality and little sense in many of their actions.
A challenging but rewarding read that has sparked my interest further in an area of mythological history that is overshadowed by it's Greek and Roman counter parts.
Byatt's prose is captivating and so visceral I felt like I could touch the Norse world I became immersed within. It is a text that would benefit from reading aloud to hear the harsh fricative sounds laced throughout Byatt's writing.
What surprised me most about this book was that I enjoyed reading Byatt's commentary about it more than the myth itself. It made me feel more secure that I was meant to find the gods lacking in personality and little sense in many of their actions.
A challenging but rewarding read that has sparked my interest further in an area of mythological history that is overshadowed by it's Greek and Roman counter parts.
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This retelling struck me as abstract and dry. I know some readers always find Byatt abstract and dry, but the intellectual quality of her writing is one of the characteristics I usually find most appealing. Here, however, it wasn’t effective—it sucked all the vibrancy out of what I find is an earthy mythos. Unlike others in the Canongate's The Myths series that I’ve read, Byatt didn’t “retell” the myth, but simply told the myth literally, under a thin veneer of a girl who, during World War II in the UK, likes to read Norse mythology. I’ve recently read Neal Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, and frankly it was far more enjoyable, if far less academic.