Scan barcode
A review by vertellerpaul
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Stephen Fry
5.0
The ancient Greeks knew the joy of listening to a story one is already familiar with. They would go to a theatre, not to be surprised by an original story, but to revisit one they already knew and enjoy the way it was told.
In Mythos, Stephen Fry rarely tells a story I didn’t know yet, but his skilled retellings are erudite, clever and original. Often he takes a snippet of story from an obscure source and incorporates that into a better known one. He invents dialogue, description and detail, and adds alliteration and other stylistic tricks. I love that.
The footnotes and afterword are an eclectic collection of factoids almost in QI-style. You can hear Fry going: “Oh, I can tell something quite interesting about this.” I’m sure he had to be restrained by either himself or his editor, or there might have been hundreds of extra remarks about etymologies, histories and sciences.
Talking about an eclectic collection: after he finishes the materials primarily taken from Hesiod, Fry picks and chooses from the wealth of material and often tells the more obscure myths, mostly from the works of Ovid. There is no Achilles, no Odysseus, no Theseus, Hercules or Aeneas. He favours stories about gender-issues, love and metamorphoses. He writes them the way he would tell them out loud: with asides, short explanations, introductions and conclusions. I could almost hear him speak.
The book looks fantastic, has numerous (and yet again: eclectic) illustrations (sadly concentrated on two sets of picture pages and taken out of context), large letters. The only thing to complain about is the lack of a reading ribbon in a book with these high production standards, but that’s easily remedied by a bookmark, of course.
Not easily remedied is the complete lack of a table of contents or an index. If you want to (re)read a specific story, your only option is to leaf through the entire book and stumble on the story you’re looking for.
All in all we can only hope that there will be a Mythos II, or Mythos Beta, in which Fry covers some of the hero’s stories and many, many more.
In Mythos, Stephen Fry rarely tells a story I didn’t know yet, but his skilled retellings are erudite, clever and original. Often he takes a snippet of story from an obscure source and incorporates that into a better known one. He invents dialogue, description and detail, and adds alliteration and other stylistic tricks. I love that.
The footnotes and afterword are an eclectic collection of factoids almost in QI-style. You can hear Fry going: “Oh, I can tell something quite interesting about this.” I’m sure he had to be restrained by either himself or his editor, or there might have been hundreds of extra remarks about etymologies, histories and sciences.
Talking about an eclectic collection: after he finishes the materials primarily taken from Hesiod, Fry picks and chooses from the wealth of material and often tells the more obscure myths, mostly from the works of Ovid. There is no Achilles, no Odysseus, no Theseus, Hercules or Aeneas. He favours stories about gender-issues, love and metamorphoses. He writes them the way he would tell them out loud: with asides, short explanations, introductions and conclusions. I could almost hear him speak.
The book looks fantastic, has numerous (and yet again: eclectic) illustrations (sadly concentrated on two sets of picture pages and taken out of context), large letters. The only thing to complain about is the lack of a reading ribbon in a book with these high production standards, but that’s easily remedied by a bookmark, of course.
Not easily remedied is the complete lack of a table of contents or an index. If you want to (re)read a specific story, your only option is to leaf through the entire book and stumble on the story you’re looking for.
All in all we can only hope that there will be a Mythos II, or Mythos Beta, in which Fry covers some of the hero’s stories and many, many more.