A feminist re-telling of the Iliad in which the heroine is the captive Briseis, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, is shortlisted for a literary prize.
Briseis is the heroine of my Troy Town Tale (1999), though I made something of a mystery of it by not revealing that she is the narrator until many pages in; and the story is wider than the Iliad, dragging in much of the vast network of the Greeks’ legends about their heroic age.
I doubt that the idea was borrowed from my TTT, which, being self-published, isn’t widely known. A blockbuster film Troy appeared in 2004 and I thought it was a travesty, with a stuck-on opening episode of Achilles fighting a giant, more like David and Goliath, and gratingly modern dialogue (Hector to Paris before his duel with Menelaus: “Are you sure you want to do this?”), but there were ideas that could have echoed TTT..
I’ve found this pencil drawing, the precursor of the painting used on the TTT dust jacket. The scene is near to the coastal town that was the home of Briseis. It was one of sixty or so sketches I made – though most were much more sketchy – while bicycling around the Troad, “Troyland,” the northwestern corner of what is now Turkey.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
I have only recently discovered universalworkshop, recommended by my UNCW astronomy professor, Dr. Brian Davis. I am thankful to have found it! I share many of your passions, space, art, literature, and story-telling. I will be buying your book soon. My own journey has made me a fan of the Odyssey. As a veteran, I see Odysseus as being home after the war and all his trials and tribulations in the work to be metaphors for the things he and his men face as they try to put the war and Troy, behind them. I had a similar idea to rewrite the Odyssey from the perspective of his first mate, Eurylochus.
Thanks for this post!
That is a fine insight about Odysseus, who came to mean many different things to later generations. In the Odyssey he is admirable, except for his final hanging of the servant girls; in the Iliad, I find him not so likable.
PS – Brendan, go ahead and write Eurylochus’s tale!
Have you read Christa Wolf’s “Cassandra”? I need to order TTT, by the way!
No, I haven’t read that. I just now looked it up and read its plot. Cassandra of course figures in TTT.