Homer's Daughter

Rating:
Summary: TOO CLEVER BY HALF OF 1%
Review: I suppose I 'enjoyed' this book in the same weary way I 'enjoyed' the same author's Wife To Mr Milton, which is also narrated in a female persona. The ever-so-clever wheeze here is to suppose that the Odyssey was indited not by Homer, nor even by another Greek of the same name, but by the Princess Nausicaa, a memorable character in it, largely for her peculiar-looking name. The Princess is not on such firm ground as Mrs Milton, whose husband definitely was one person and who definitely wrote Paradise Lost and other noble works. When I was last up-to-date with Homeric scholarship (thirty-odd years ago), the English-speaking scholars had at last been converted to the view that the Homeric epics were a cumulative effort of a whole tradition of illiterate bards. This view found a shrill but entertaining and very readable proponent in Denys Page, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, whose The Homeric Odyssey is in fact a far better read than this book, even if you don't know Greek. Page even has no great opinion of the Odyssey as a poem, a very tenable view I would say.

So Graves's princess is a fraud of the worst order, a pale shadow of the 'dim phantom' who visits Penelope in Book IV. She is not purporting to be anybody in particular, but a whole lot of people. Her/their poem sucks anyway. And -- wait for this -- she does not even know what her own name means! She thinks it is something to do with BURNING ships! Can you imagine a people as superstitious as the ancient Greeks having the princess of an island that got its living from the sea called 'Burner of Ships'? The derivation of the name is from the root 'kas' with the 's' lost between vowels in the usual Greek way, and that root signifies 'excellence', which you must admit makes a lot more sense.

I still enjoyed the book as make-believe, insofar as I ever enjoy 'drag-artist' narratives. I enjoyed Wife To Mr Milton a bit more, partly because much as I detest her husband as a human being his big poem is my outright #1 in any language I can read.

Rating:
Summary: Great premise -- Disappointing novel
Review: Robert Graves had a great idea: he wanted to elaborate on the idea that "The Odyssey" was written by a woman and that the woman-author was one of the characters in the epic poem. Since the only virtuous human women in the poem are Penelope and Nausicaa, Robert Graves concluded that Nausicaa is a good candidate to be the poet.

The idea itself is quite brilliant. "The Odyssey" has always been called a "women's" epic because except for Odysseus, all other important leading characters are women and the story focuses more on domestic life than on war-like exploits. Thus, imagining Nausicaa as the epic's author is not so outlandish.

That said, "Homer's Daughter" the novel is hugely disappointing. One of the major reasons why it failed to impress me is that the tone of the novel was very impersonal. I was always aware that Robert Graves was telling the story instead of the proper narrator -- Nausicaa. Speaking of Nausicaa, she is extremely unappealing. She seems to be very intelligent and clear-headed but so cold and closed-off that I could not care less about her. All the personal stories failed to impress me because either they were almost cartoonish, like Laodamas and Ctlimene, or plain boring, like Nausicaa and Aethon. The meeting between Odysseus and Nausicaa in "The Odyssey" is one of the best parts in the epic. Especially, when Odysseus says to Nausicaa that best of all, he wishes that she would know harmony in marriage. The meeting between Nausicaa and Aethon in "Homer's Daughter", patterned after Odysseus' and Nausicaa's in "The Odyssey, cannot compare. Also, Aethon pops up in the novel but I do not learn anything about his character except that almost everyone who meets him has an immediate trust and affinity for him. Instead of telling us that, Graves could have shown better why Aethon inspires such trust.

Robert Graves is extremely good at telling myths and whenever characters do that in the novel, the stories come alive. This is why it is such a disappointment that he cannot reproduce the same magic when the action is between the characters in the novel. He also writes good speeches and the confrontations in the Council and between Aethon and the suitors are also well-realized. But when the characters try to related to each other, the result is unremarkable.

Robert Graves should have tried harder to expand on his idea but he seemed to be so enthralled with the premise that he pays little attention to anything else. All in all, this is not a bad book but not as interesting as it could have been or as other books that are historical novels based on mythology, such as Graves' own "Hercules, My Shipmate" and Mary Renault's "The King Must Die".

Rating:
Summary: An intelligent princess (by stardustraven)
Review: With the Sicilian princess Nausicaa, author/poet Robert Graves created an interesting and intelligent female character. He casts his Nausicaa actually both in the Nausicaa/Penelope parts of Homer's Odyssey. This young lady certainly doesn't sit still, but makes things happen. She solves mysteries, saves her brothers from murder and keeps her father's realm from being ursurped and herself from the suitors clutches. In the meantime she entertains Homeric ambitions. This is a very good novel but like the other reviewers I think Nausicaa isn't just such a compelling creation as the emperor Claudius. I felt too much Graves' stamp on her. As if it were for the author much easier to get into Claudius' skin than into Nausicaa's (and in the case of a young girl, one would expect some spontaneity too). This novel reads more as Robert Graves who is masquerading in the guise of Nausicaa than as an enchanting and appealing heroine. This Nausicaa doesn't entirely convince me as the reader, to believe in her, whilst the original Nausicaa of Homer has the power to enchant me time and again. Homer's Nausicaa is an unforgettable heroine. The pace of this novel may be a bit slow in the beginning but later picks up.

All in all for lovers of Homer and Robert Graves 'Homer's Daughter' is still an interesting and worthwhile novel, but not without its flaws.