Iliad, Metamorphoses, God of Small Things

Lots of serious reading this week, which is always a nice feeling.

I got through the end of book 13 of the Iliad, which was just great. It's the kind of section that makes me glad to read it in Greek, a feeling that's all too rare in most of book 13. Most of the book is a lot of random fighting, without much memorable going on -- it's really there to set the Greeks up for the failures that will bring Achilles back into the fight. At the same time, Homer doesn't really want to show the Greeks being beaten by the Trojans (I guess his audience wouldn't have been very happy with sections like that; plus, he has to work within the mythological framework, in which none of the major Greek heroes perished in this part of the Trojan War).

But here, we have some magnificent similes, like the one which compares the Trojans to the surf -- gleaming white, and coming in wave after wave, and making noise, and all in two quick lines. We get some great speeches by Hector, and the speeches always sound good in the original; the swift dactylic line pushes the listener forward in a way you just can't get in English.

In Ovid, we get the epilog to the Phaethon story, in which his sisters mourn until they turn to trees, his lover Cygnus turns into a swan, then Sun (his father) returns to the sky, and everything returns to normal. It really does feel like an afterthought, after the long main story.

God of Small Things is a gorgeous novel by Arundhati Roy. It's very intricate, with a plot that literally revolves around a central event that's not revealed until the end. The chapters swirl around, some from before the event, some from after, but getting closer and closer until the final revelation. Roy puts in enough foreshadowing that the ending is not really a surprise, but little enough so that it's still shattering when it happens.

I was also blown away by her language. She's one of the few authors in my experience who writes from a child's perspective and makes it feel real. The only other example that I can think of is the opening parts of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.