I really wanted to love this book. I audited a course a few years ago, to finally force myself to read the major epics, and fell in love with them. The Odyssey has one of the best paragraphs in literature. About the joy a happy marriage brings, something about friends rejoicing and foes repining 'but the truth of it all is with her and him.' Sigh. Lovely. But Odysseus was always a bit of a troubling character to me, his men dying for him while he protects himself, long affairs while he's, um, trying to get home to the wife that must remain faithful to be valued?, deliberately provoking the gods, etc. But, Homer infuses him with enough wit and charm to at least make you want to see how things turn out, and somehow you still like him, even though he butchers people with reckless abandon on his return (the suitors were jerks, okay, but the maids?-see The Penelopiad). This book is cold. The female characters are boring (or out of left field- Ariadne becomes Calypso?? What?? It just didn't work for me. One traitorous macho Greek dickhead left me, I'll just hang out here and hope another comes along?) and Odysseus is cold, cold, cold. The writing is lovely, I had to open my dictionary 50 times-refulgent is a good thing, and oubliette is a dungeon of some kind-which to me is fun, and he has done a remarkable job of capturing the feel of the epics, but just the syntax, not the charm.

I did like 'the Iliad of Odysseus', where he spends the last battle of the Trojan war hiding in a supply tent. Then he heads down the coast masquerading as a bard. When asked why he has a sword, and no lute, he claims he lost the lute, but the sword knows songs like "Feint to the heart then cut the hamstring," and "Throw sand in the eye and stab the sword hand." Funny. But it's the only one I really enjoyed. When I read The Iliad I always had an image in my head of Odysseus rolling his eyes while Achilles and Agamemnon swaggered about. Waiting for them to stop huffing and puffing so he could figure out how to win the wretched war and go home. This story reminded me of that. A few others came close, but on the whole I was disappointed. Never really bored, but never really engaged either.

I didn't like the Achilles as golem story, which is a shame, as it's the perfect explanation for a character I always hated. He has no mind of his own, it all makes sense now!

And I hate footnotes (thank you David Foster Wallace). Even when they are faux.

Hector rules.