In the entirety of "The Iliad," she notes, "no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier's valor; no heaven will receive him." In the epic, "words and phrases for the process of death make clear that this is something baneful." The problem with "The War That Killed Achilles" doesn't lie in Ms. Alexander's intelligent readings, her combing through the text looking for ambivalence about, or fear and loathing of, war, even if she might have paid closer attention to what Chris Hedges, a former correspondent for The New York Times, has called war's enduring attraction -- which is that "even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living." The problem is that her book is such a dutiful walk-through of Lattimore's translation. Ms. Alexander quotes from, and summarizes, Lattimore's words so frequently that without them her book would threaten to collapse into a heap of thin if shapely sticks and twigs. -- review by Dwight Garner
Thanks, SunkenCiv!
I’ll look forward to reading this book. When I first read The Iliad so many years ago, I felt Andromache’s pain - loving her husband so desperately and yet having no power to influence their fate. A woman’s interpretation of this great Classic is much to be desired.
The reviews make it sound as though giving this for Christmas is the literary equivalent of coal in the stocking.