The Mahabharata, vol. 1

The Mahabharata is one of the world's longest poems; it grew over time through a long process of accretion. As a result, there are digressions within digressions.

It's also so long that any unabridged translation spans many volumes. The one I chose to start tackling, by Bibek Roy, is about 10% of the whole. At that point, about 600 pages in, the main storyline is just warming up. What I mostly got was an interesting grab-bag of Indian mythology, including the birth of the Garuda, the creation of the nagas, and so on. 

It was also sometimes a bit of a slog. The major players have many names, which makes it tricky. And sometimes the same story is told twice, right near each other. I also feel like the translation is not particularly felicitous, although of course it's hard to tell. But I'd like to hope that the original is more poetic than Roy's translation. 

One of these days, I'm sure I'll get on to volume 2, because a lot of vol 1 was fascinating, despite my difficulties. But I'm also not in a rush. 

Ragnarok

A. S. Byatt's Ragnarok is, as the title implies, her retelling of the Norse story of Ragnarok, the final battle at the end of the world.  In order to give a complete story, she starts with Yggdrasil and the creation of the world, moves through the story of the Midgard Serpent and Fenris Wolf, and ends up at the Final Battle.

This is a somewhat idiosyncratic rendering (Thor, for example, shows up for three pages), filtered through Byatt's concerns.  Byatt takes the idea that the gods knew Ragnarok was coming, but couldn't bring themselves to take the steps necessary to avoid it, and uses it as a stand-in for our knowledge that our environmental depredation is bad, but can't really bring ourselves to lessen it.  (She makes all this clear in a didactic afterword).

I enjoyed this book, but it's fairly minor as Byatt's books go.  It would be hard to recommend as an introduction to Norse mythology; the telling is too idiosyncratic.  It also plays against Byatt's strengths as a writer, I think.  She chooses an intentionally distancing point-of-view, refracting the whole story through the eyes of a girl growing up outside London during WWII.  Although Byatt is a very intellectual writer, I think her best writing has an emotional resonance to it, and this sort of distancing effect makes it hard to engage with the material.  (Byatt has also chosen not to humanize her gods; in general, I agree with this approach, because gods should be something "other", but, again, it's not a register that she plays well in).

On the other hand, it's hard to be too negative about Ragnarok; even weak Byatt is better than most authors at the peak of their game.  Although I'd prefer another Possession to this, Ragnarok is still better than many other books I've read lately.