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A review by branhowe
Omero, Iliade by Alessandro Baricco
4.0
I find the actual Illiad boring because of the way it's written so this retelling was perfect for me to understand what the story was about without adding too many flourishes of it's own to the original text. Read the translation in Spanish by Anagrama and it was fairly good.
It's kind of fascinating how much emphasis was put down on the descriptions of the deaths of these men, pretty gore. The only thing I found kind of annoying (but this is most likely fault of the original text) is that it assumes you know which men were troyans and which men were achaeans from scratch and truth be told the only ones I was very clear about before entering the text were Achilles, Ulysses and Hector. The rest went past in a blur and many were just named probably to honour them as warriors but it didn't mean anything to me as a reader or to understand how each death affected the war being fought.
Still find it pretty hilariously stupid that everything starts because of Helena but what called my attention the most was that sometimes the actions of these people felt absolutely illogical to my modern mind. Taking Helena as example, the way she sees Paris coming back into the city to hide and decides it's okay to follow her elder's advice to go and have sex with him while "lamenting the fact that she's the cause for this war". She's the example that came to mind faster, but there are several moments where I see these contradictions with various characters and I find them jarring.
It's kind of fascinating how much emphasis was put down on the descriptions of the deaths of these men, pretty gore. The only thing I found kind of annoying (but this is most likely fault of the original text) is that it assumes you know which men were troyans and which men were achaeans from scratch and truth be told the only ones I was very clear about before entering the text were Achilles, Ulysses and Hector. The rest went past in a blur and many were just named probably to honour them as warriors but it didn't mean anything to me as a reader or to understand how each death affected the war being fought.
Still find it pretty hilariously stupid that everything starts because of Helena but what called my attention the most was that sometimes the actions of these people felt absolutely illogical to my modern mind. Taking Helena as example, the way she sees Paris coming back into the city to hide and decides it's okay to follow her elder's advice to go and have sex with him while "lamenting the fact that she's the cause for this war". She's the example that came to mind faster, but there are several moments where I see these contradictions with various characters and I find them jarring.