A Flavour of the Book: “I
raise my sword and start killing.
They were all sleeping, you see?
I was like a lion who meets a flock without its shepherd, and pounces in
the midst of it, raging. I kill
them one after the another, blood everywhere, twelve of them I kill…”
The Authortrek View:
This is an exceptional retelling of The
Iliad. Alessandro Baricco
wanted to cut down the text, to make it possible for it to be read to a modern
day audience with far greater time demands than those in Homer’s day. I was dubious at first when I read that
Baricco had dispensed with the scenes that featured the gods, however, he
justifies this by writing that they interrupted the flow of the story. By the time that I was several pages
into the narrative, I wasn’t missing the gods at all, such is the lyrical power
of Baricco’s prose and the potency of the story itself. And Baricco has taken far less
liberties with the story than David Benioff did recently with his dire screenplay
for Troy. Another
successful liberty that Baricco has taken with the story is to tell it from the
point of view of several characters, and this is a device that works very
well. Alessandro Baricco’s version
of The Iliad very successfully brings the brilliant story alive for a
new generation. As Baricco notes
in his epilogue, although this is primarily a story about the glory of war, it
is also a very human story, with the characters of the losers shown to be just as
vital and heroic as those of the victors.
Baricco also brings to the fore the many calls for peace during the
story, and the resistance of the urge to fight, while musing on the very
different wars of today. Alessandro
Baricco’s An Iliad is, in essence, a very enthralling read.
You can read a resume of the book on our Amazon store below. To find out more about the author, please visit our Alessandro Baricco page.
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