Homer's Daughter / The Anger of Achilles

We don't know who, or even if, Homer was. Given threads of internal evidence in the Odyssey, Robert Graves invents, or discovers, that the author of the poem was herself part of the epic action. He chooses the beguiling, clear-headed Nausicaa and re-visions the post-Trojan world through her eyes. This is the theme of Homer's Daughter, one of Graves's most daring fictional acts." The Odyssey has been described as a 'women's' epic, full of female characters and different in kind and colour from the Iliad with its tight focus and its largely male world. Graves's Nausicaa is a brilliant story-teller. She is a princess of mixed ancestry, combining in herself the various cultures that inform the language and folklore of the epic. She lives in a Greek-Trojan settlement in Sicily some time after the Trojan War. Graves makes it possible for us to believe that she tells her own, true story, buried within Homer's epic. There is adventure and intrigue; the book stands near the beginning of a tradition that includes Leonardo Sciascia's The Council of Egypt and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Nausicaa is smart and resilient. She solves the mystery of her brother's disappearance, then organises a counterplot, recalling Odysseus's bloody, triumphal return to Ithaca.


Genre: Fantasy