Homer's Odyssey is not the only version of the
story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth
would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I
have drawn on material other than the Odyssey, especially for the
details of Penelope's parentage, her early life and marriage, and the
scandalous rumors circulating about her. I’ve chosen to give the
telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The
maids form a chanting and singing Chorus, which focuses on two
questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of the Odyssey: What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope
really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn't hold water:
there are too many inconsistencies. I’ve always been haunted by the
hanged maids and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself." -- from
Margaret Atwood's Foreword to The Penelopiad.
For more about this series see A Short History of Myth, also in this issue.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
"While the story isn't new, Atwood's approach reminds us that there are endlessly original ways to tell it. Grade A." - Entertainment Weekly.
"Despite the jokiness, anachronism and rumbustiousness, Margaret Atwood's Penelope is coherently and persuasively imagined; a heroine transplanted from contemporary Toronto to the Elysian Fields." - London Times.
"Unhurried, unshowy, she gives us the huge pleasures of rhythm and structure and story, and characters too - the rough Odysseus, the perhaps duplicitous wife, Penelope, and her "intolerably beautiful" cousin Helen of Troy." - The Telegraph (UK).
"Much of the story's rich material has been dumped at the back of the book in a single chapter .... This marvelous material seems not to have been metabolized by Atwood's imagination, and the result is merely a riff on a better story that comes dangerously close to being a spoof." - New York Times.
"Like opera lyrics exposed in all their naked banality in translation, myth does not fare well in this colloquial feminist retelling, especially in the choruslike commentary of Penelope's maidservants, who are executed for murky reasons on Odysseus' return, a feminist outrage of particular interest to Atwood. This is an 'Odyssey" that sets sail on a sea of theory. Without language that sings, myth isn't myth at all." - The Boston Globe.
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