What is Creemore reading? It’s been a busy summer, with a raft of new books arriving each week – but it’s the release of the film The Odyssey that has made this one so memorable.
From book to screen and back again: Hollywood has a way of reviving interest
in a title or an author, and this summer it’s sparked a wider appetite for the book/ poem but also the Greek myths themselves.
As all great storytellers know, there are many ways to tell a story. Whose perspective will it be told through, how literal should it be, or how true to the original? It is in some of these decisions that a director or writer makes in the screenplay, or on the page that distinguishes a film, book or play and make it unique. Christopher Nolan made decisions on this classic text for example to keep the complex structure of the original poem – through flashbacks and parallel timelines. He made decisions on which parts of the hero’s journey to keep and which to cut – decisions shaped by everything a film can show that a page can only describe – one of monsters, witches, and magic.
We thoroughly enjoyed Netflix’s KAOS from a couple of years ago with Jeff Goldblum playing Zeus in the modern age – it was dark, hilarious and action-packed. If you did too, then I can recommend a recently published book, Daphnis & Chloe by Canadian author Colin McAdam, who delivers in beautiful prose a meditation on love and all its opposites, and on our human struggles to overcome pain, fear, and our failings – all with the reminder that the sun will rise each morning. That love, innocence, and beauty will prevail in the darkest of times.
These Greek myths and their adaptations and links to our modern day world continue to delight, and they seem to have found a well-thumbed page here in Creemore. But cinema isn’t the only wardrobe door back into these stories. For every retelling following Odysseus as the hero, there’s a shelf of books curious about what happened to everyone left on the periphery, or on the cutting room floor. Our display table over the summer highlighted many such books, including: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad which hands the story to Penelope herself, turning 20 years of weaving and waiting into something wry, thrilling, but also devastating. Or Pat Barker’s Women of Troy series that does something similar for the women of the fallen city, giving voice to those Homer mostly left as prizes or casualties. And finally Madeline Miller’s Circe, already a favourite on our shelves, takes a minor witch and makes her the whole story – one of exile, power, and self-invention.
Even our youngest readers are getting braver versions these days, ones that aren’t afraid to show Odysseus as a complex character – one that is proud, homesick, and sometimes foolish, rather than simply heroic. It’s a good reminder that “hero” has always been a complicated thing to be.
What the hype of this film has given us this Summer is how many different people are finding their way into these “Myths Retold” stories. And how differently each experience that same story depending on whose voice is doing the telling. Maybe that’s the real definition of a great book – one whose story turns out to be worth telling again, and again, and from every possible angle.
Kate and Joel Simpson co-own Curiosity House Books in Creemore. Each month they explore what the community is reading, and why. Find them on Instagram @curiosityhousebooks.com.
