The Siege of Troy

July 8, 2019
This layered retelling of the Trojan War from Kallifatides (Another Life) is filtered through the perspectives of a nurturing schoolteacher and her adoring student during WWII. The setting is a Greek village under attack during the war. The young teacher, identified as “Miss,” takes her students into a cave as bombs fall, and diverts them with her version of the Greek myth, which takes up the bulk of the text. Each chapter of the book (and the yarn spinning) is bracketed by a brief passages from the point-of-view of the unnamed 15-year-old narrator, including details about his life outside the cave, his strong friendship with classmate Dimitra, and his infatuation with Miss (when Miss acquired a lover, he’s devastated). Miss’s version of the myth is florid, violent, and poetic, with memorable psychological depth—both Hector and Achilles are complex; Nestor and Patroclus have additional dimension, as well. The central relationship is the deep friendship between Achilles and Patroclus. As Greek resistance falters and the Germans take over the village, the narrator witnesses the violence of war firsthand. Kallifatides’s reworking of Homer’s epic provides an intriguing take on the human dimension of the myth and strikes a rich, resonant note.

September 27, 2019

Homer's Iliad--the "strongest" antiwar novel ever written? That's the belief of Kallifatides (Another Life: On Memory, Language, Love, and the Passage of Time), a multi-award-winning Greek novelist and translator who's lived in Sweden since 1964. A lifetime admirer of the Iliad who regrets that the great classic is not better known, he's out to remedy the situation by writing his own version of the Trojan War. He sets his tale in war-torn Greece under brutal German occupation during World War II. Miss, the young schoolteacher on whom the narrator has a crush, gathers her village class together each day and begins to tell the story of the war, despite bombing raids and public executions of Greek resistance fighters. In her retelling, such protagonists as Hector, Helen, Paris, and Patroclus come vividly alive as the war drags to its inexorable end. Delargy's fluid translation enhances this classic. VERDICT Kallifatides mirrors events of that great conflict in the daily lives of the villagers, for example, portraying the cruelty of the warrior Achilles as akin to that of the German soldiers. Who would have imagined that the immense original could be rendered simply and compellingly in so few pages? This translation is highly recommended to all readers with a healthy curiosity.-- Edward B. Cone, New York

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019
Greece, 1945. It's the waning days of WWII, but the small village of the unnamed 15-year-old narrator remains occupied by the Germans. The local school has not functioned since 1941, but that changes when a new teacher comes to town. A young woman known simply as Miss, she is thin as a strip of light, and the narrator immediately falls in love with her. He; his best friend, Dimitra; and their classmates also fall in love with The Iliad, which Miss, a gifted storyteller, recounts for them in her own words, day by day. Her recitations are the heart of the book, offering a literary war to match the war still raging outside in the real world. The parallels are clear; at one point, for example, Dimitra says, What a terrible person Achilles was! He's like the Germans. Kallifatides has done a splendid job of retelling The Iliad through Miss' voice, which possesses the elegance and eloquence of simplicity. It's a lovely introduction to Homer's original.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)