Take a photo of a barcode or cover
ronanmcd 's review for:
Pandora's Jar
by Natalie Haynes
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I really wanted to love this book, and I did, once I got used to the text jumping from here to there, across aeons of time, media, into the underworld and back etc. This isn't a complaint, it was necessary. I just struggled to keep up.
The last 4 pages are where it all happens. It's not a spoiler to say that here Haynes really forces home the idea that what we perceive as canonical texts aren't so. They are just selected translations & texts that have been upheld in the past, and often don't even reflect the origins of the myths, nor their varying perspectives and non-fixed narratives. Even the characters' viewpoints are received as somehow being correct - we often are shown the "heroics" through the eyes of sociopaths. There are other characters in these stories, and they have been relegated, substituted or subdued. 3000 years of classical writing and academics being a male preserve might just, ever so slightly, possibly, cause that to be the case...
The last 4 pages are where it all happens. It's not a spoiler to say that here Haynes really forces home the idea that what we perceive as canonical texts aren't so. They are just selected translations & texts that have been upheld in the past, and often don't even reflect the origins of the myths, nor their varying perspectives and non-fixed narratives. Even the characters' viewpoints are received as somehow being correct - we often are shown the "heroics" through the eyes of sociopaths. There are other characters in these stories, and they have been relegated, substituted or subdued. 3000 years of classical writing and academics being a male preserve might just, ever so slightly, possibly, cause that to be the case...