These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination... Rabindranath Tagore

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
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On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--from Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Saturday, September 23, 2017

The Penelopiad...


The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood - Canongate Books (2005)


Now that I'm dead I know everything...

Helen was a siren
my measure of all things I can't be...
and don't wish to be
most of the time

who needs beauty if there is no secure happiness...


But I am no role model...

My father wanted to gift me to water when I was just a child...
That had no clear or pleasant explanation...

my mother was a Naiaid
spirited in all things water
No surprise that her wedding advice involved water...
Remember you are half water.
If you can't go through an obstacle go around it.
Water does.
And Odysseus
(my apparent husband)
He simply had to keep travelling
on water

So if water is meant to be the supreme cleanser
Why did my life feature

So much blood?


 MY GOODREADS REVIEW
The PenelopiadThe Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Unusual...creative...But I'm not sure...Penelope, Odysseus' wife endeavours to present her story from ancient spirit worlds...Penelope is adamant that her life amounted to far more than years of loom weaving and staving off suitors while she waited for Odysseus to return from his travels...She wants to embellish? the legend record with a little help from 12 maidens, who intersperse the narrative with the traditional Greek Chorus line...Is she a weaver of dreams just as Odysseus seemed to be? Were they really the perfect match? Should we sympathise or judge?
Overall, an unsettling departure from Margaret Atwood's accustomed style... little evidence of rich and lingering turns of phrase...
And is the chorus a little too burlesquish?
It's all so different...unusual...creative...But I'm not sure...

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