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Paino : Atlaksen ja Herakleen myytti (2005)

Tekijä: Jeanette Winterson

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
1,3154614,322 (3.72)47
A "profound and provocative" reimagining of the Greek legend by the New York Times-bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (Daily Mail).   With wit and verve, Whitbread Award-winning novelist Jeanette Winterson brings the mythical figure of Atlas into the space age and sets him free at last. In her retelling of the story of a god tricked into holding the world on his shoulders and his brief reprieve, she sets difficult questions about the nature of choice and coercion, how we choose our own destiny and at the same time can liberate ourselves from our seeming fate.   "Dazzling . . . Winterson's embrace of the mythic landscape is evident in her rich imagery . . . cathartic . . . this short novel fulfills a number of the criteria myth is meant to embody" --The New York Times Book Review… (lisätietoja)
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Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 45) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
This is a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles (a myth I remembered nothing about, even if I remembered the two characters individually) in Winterson's characterstically cheeky, humorous, poetic, and self-referential style. It feels a bit thin for something by her (I feel like surely it's a novella, not a novel), but I laughed at the jokes and found some keen insights into human nature. The ending is weird, but I think it worked. Sometimes it really is that simple! Not as good as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (obviously) or even The Gap of Time, but still highly enjoyable.
  Stevil2001 | May 7, 2021 |
Rating: 3.75* of five

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

No one can ever say Jeannette Winterson lacks authorial chops. Self-aware aphoristic ones. That is a beautiful distillation of the purpose of becoming an author.

Atlas, he of the weight of the world on his shoulders, had a mother. She was Earth, Gaia, THE Mother. His Titanic self was born of her union with Poseidon, the Sea, her complement in this Universe of Elements called Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. (Not for the Greeks the effete Orientalism of including Wood or Metal! They spring from Earth, are held within her potentialities.)
Earth was always strange and new to herself. She never anticipated what she would do next. She never guessed the coming wonder. She loved the risk, the randomness, the lottery probability of a winner. We forget, but she never did, that what we take for granted is the success story. The failures have disappeared. This planet that seems so obvious and inevitable is the jackpot.

As we're learning better and better every day. Over 4000 "exoplanets" (humans and their deep-seated need to discriminate!) later, we still have found no other planet truly capable of bringing forth Life as we know it. Permaybehaps because those other Mothers don't have mates:
She loved {the Waters} because he showed her to herself.

Or the *right* mates, anyway. She's unique, our Gaia, and we...
...no, not now.

Atlas the Titan rebels against his younger, prettier siblings the Olympians because he didn't want them telling him what to do. His Garden of Eden was Atlantis, the eternally shining and perfect past that every generation of humanity is certain was without problems or cares, everyone always got along, love and respect were common as pig tracks, and Gaia filled our bellies with all her bounty unstintingly.

Snort.

So Atlas pursued his war against the Olympians on the flimsiest of pretexts for both sides:
My daughters {the Hesperides} had been secretly eating the sacred fruit. Who could blame them, the tree, sweet-scented and heavy, and the grass underneath it wet with evening dew? Their feet were bare and their mouths were eager. They are girls after all.
I did not see the harm myself, but the gods are jealous of their belongings.

Zeus and Company prevail in the ensuing war over trivialities, this "we don't like you so we're taking away your stuff because we like doing AND having that." (It's hard for me to read this myth without thinking the Greeks were busy explaining slavery to themselves.) In his "guilt" and its ensuing punishment, Atlas is condemned forever and always to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders as Olympian punishment for the egregious individualistic desire for freedom he went to war to secure:
I bent my back and braced my right leg, kneeling with my left. I bowed my head and held my hands, palms up, almost like surrender. I suppose it was surrender. Who is strong enough to escape their fate? Who can avoid what they must become?

And that's the crux of the matter. Atlas accepts his punishment and assumes his burden Because.

That's it. Really. Just...because. You can blow all the smoke and angle the mirrors however you like: The only thing you'll ever see is "Because" shaped in smoke and reflected at as many angles as there are. Fate is a deeply convenient double-bind technique, like sin and guilt. "You're bad! BAD! Yes, YOU ARE BAD!!" and the punishments needn't even ever be external...they're hefted onto shoulders by the bearers themselves, never to be put down because they are obviously just and fair and right. Why?

Because.

So here into the narrative comes Enkidu...oh dear, please pardon me!, I meant to type "Heracles" honest I did!...the unbridled, unreflective Master of the Universe, the id-on-legs that Zeus the seducer tricked his wife into suckling (a story I don't know, but feel I should look into) so as to offer his half-human bonny wee laddie immortality. He's godlike in his strength, beauty, and sense of entitlement. He's a rapist, a murderer, and a hero to those it suits him to assist.

I think...it's just a suspicion, mind...but I think it's just possible that Author Winterson (a known Lesbian) might have a few smallish issues with cishet toxic masculinity. Enkidu...there I go again, silly old faggot...HERACLES, of course, rapes women, masturbates in front of his cock-tease stepmother:
Hera was beautiful. She was so beautiful that even a thug like Heracles wished he had shaved. Without a mirror she showed him to himself, muscle-swollen and scarred. He feared her and desired her. His prick kept filling and deflating like a pair of fire bellows. He wanted to rape her but he didn’t dare. Her eyes were all contempt and mild disgust.

...as well as his dupe of a cousin Atlas, and offers half-heartedly to wank the latter when he says, "I don't have a free hand," when Heracles asks him to put on the show. Doesn't happen...Atlas says, "I'm too tired," eliciting from Heracles a derisive snort of "you sound like a girl."

You know the myth: Heracles (literally "the Greatness of Hera") needs Atlas to pilfer the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, in return taking the weight of the world onto his own shoulders. It does not go well for Heracles:
Hera says, "No hero can be destroyed by the world. His reward is to destroy himself. Not what you meet on the way, but what you are, will destroy you, Heracles."
***
His body was as strong as Atlas’s, but his nature was not. Hera was right about him there. Heracles’s strength was a cover for his weakness.

Heracles is waking up! At the precise moment he can not run, hide, fight, or fuck his way out of self-reflection, here it is: He's a weakling. He can't do diddly-squat that isn't a feat of his body and using only the basest, most cunning of ruses. Strategy? What's that? But need a tactician and you found your dreamboat.

The myth runs its well-told course along precisely the lines the Greeks told it for so many millennia. The insights Author Winterson are, for all they're sparkling like bubbles in prosecco, not particularly new. She does a fine job of unpacking meaning from myth. One would expect no less from the author of [Sexing the Cherry]. And, to be fair, she wasn't tasked with Revealing New Levels of Meaning in the myth itself, she was asked to retell it in a modern vein. At this she succeeded admirably. But my reading pleasure, my very real Gollumy glomming onto sentences that I want to have made into Jasperware plaques and sculpted into entire palaces of Chihuly glass, is ultimately...okay. Not superb, just okay.

She didn't do it wrong. But I've seen it done before, sometimes with the names changed and sometimes not. That is what gave the read a rating under five stars...that and the (not unreasonable, not unjustified) misandry. It wasn't very subtle, nor was it intended to be (or so it seems to me), but it also wasn't particularly insightful. That I *do* expect from Author Winterson.

Here, as my last salvo, is why I expect the unexpected and the glorious from her:
If only I understood that the globe itself, complete, perfect, unique, is a story. Science is a story. History is a story. These are the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true.

What am I? Atoms.
What are atoms? Empty space and points of light.

She speaks to us, the reader, directly and she gives herself the best lines. It's her story, she is entitled to do that. But I wanted more of this from the myth-retelling, and while I got beautiful words, I felt I wasn't given quite as much insightful wordsmithing of this last sort. ( )
1 ääni richardderus | Jan 31, 2020 |
Jeanette Winterson's novella Weight is both a retelling of Greek myths involving Atlas and Herakles and a meditation on the real and metaphoric burdens human beings must bear throughout their lives. Atlas, punished for fighting against the Olympian gods, must hold up the Kosmos for eternity. But when Herakles, the only being strong enough to take the old Titan's place, needs a favor, Atlas sees his chance. Which one of them will walk away free of the oppressive Earth?

To this myth Winterson adds some autobiographical material and some facts from astronomy and earth science. I am not sure that the meditative part worked as well as the more vivid storytelling angle. However, the book earns bonus points for including a charming characterization of Laika the cosmonaut dog. ( )
  akblanchard | Jul 9, 2019 |
This was an odd one. I love Winterson's poetic prose, but it was a kind of mash of mythology and introspection and wish fulfillment. The two readers read it a bit over emphatically, like they were in a play, which makes sense with the text, but was also distracting. ( )
  cindywho | May 27, 2019 |
Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 45) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
ei arvosteluja | lisää arvostelu
Sinun täytyy kirjautua sisään voidaksesi muokata Yhteistä tietoa
Katso lisäohjeita Common Knowledge -sivuilta (englanniksi).
Teoksen kanoninen nimi
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Alkuteoksen nimi
Teoksen muut nimet
Alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi
Henkilöt/hahmot
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Tärkeät paikat
Tärkeät tapahtumat
Kirjaan liittyvät elokuvat
Epigrafi (motto tai mietelause kirjan alussa)
Omistuskirjoitus
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
For Deborah Warner, who lifted the weight.
Ensimmäiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision.
~ Introduction
The free man never thinks of escape.
~ I want to tell the story again
My father was Poseidon. My mother was the Earth.
~ the story
Sitaatit
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
These are the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true.
Why?

Why not just put it down?
Let me crawl out from under this world I have made.
It doesn't need me any more.

Strangely, I don't need it either. I don't need the weight. Let it go. There are reservations and regrets, but let it go.

I want to tell the story again.
Viimeiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
(Napsauta nähdäksesi. Varoitus: voi sisältää juonipaljastuksia)
Erotteluhuomautus
Julkaisutoimittajat
Kirjan kehujat
Alkuteoksen kieli
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Kanoninen DDC/MDS
Kanoninen LCC

Viittaukset tähän teokseen muissa lähteissä.

Englanninkielinen Wikipedia

-

A "profound and provocative" reimagining of the Greek legend by the New York Times-bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (Daily Mail).   With wit and verve, Whitbread Award-winning novelist Jeanette Winterson brings the mythical figure of Atlas into the space age and sets him free at last. In her retelling of the story of a god tricked into holding the world on his shoulders and his brief reprieve, she sets difficult questions about the nature of choice and coercion, how we choose our own destiny and at the same time can liberate ourselves from our seeming fate.   "Dazzling . . . Winterson's embrace of the mythic landscape is evident in her rich imagery . . . cathartic . . . this short novel fulfills a number of the criteria myth is meant to embody" --The New York Times Book Review

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