The season has turned, but we don’t have to fully leave behind our Hot Greek Summer of Odyssey and classics story telling just because fall is here. Retelling the stories within the epics is probably our most longstanding human tradition: we’re forever seeking to find our way home, to grapple with the casual cruelty of life, and make sense of the world around us.
Straight-forward retellings are plentiful and easy to find. You’ve got everything from Madeline Millers’s Circe and the Song of Achilles to the Lore Olympus graphic novels to classicists like Natalie Haynes, not to mention the romances like Luna McNamara’s Pysche and Eros or the ultra dark and spicy Katee Roberts Dark Olympus series. But some of the most exciting recent books in conversations with the classics are more subtle, putting an unexpected literary overlay onto the old works we love so much.
Here are a few recent literary fiction that are not quite retellings but certainly in conversation with the classics:
Etna, Paul Yoon. In Etna, Paul Yoon introduces us to a military dog on an odyssey to return home after the war in which he’s been trained to fight has ended. There are some clear references to the Odyssey and the Iliad (we get not one but two minor characters named Achilles popping up on the journey), with themes of forgiveness and brutality and loss that are eternally resonant.
Writing an entire book from the POV of an animal and not have that book just become about the humans around them is a feat, and Yoon as done it. Read my full review.
Beginning Middle End, Valeria Luiselli Luiselli’s meditative style, her command of tone and atmosphere, weave through a delicate story of what it means to rebuild after loss. The surface story centers on a mother and daughter on a trip to return a family relic that was taken generations prior from an archeological dig in their ancestral home of Sicily. But just under that story, Luiselli pulls the reader through a layered reflection of history, time, family, and survival with such precision it’s just astounding.
And there are so many classical references in this novel. Just let them wash over you. Read my full review.
Canon, Paige Lewis
Only someone who loves the classics could have dreamt up this mad-cap, literary adventure tale. Paige Lewis creates a world that’s out of time and in conversation with not just the old gods of Homer but also the titans of absurdist storytelling like Douglass Adams and Robert Anton Wilson. Follow Yara on their god-sanctioned quest to defeat the Bad Guys, complete with a talking whale and poorly behaved deities. It’s ridiculous and immersive and one of the best books of the year. Read my full review.
Sing to Me, Jesse Browner
A young Trojan boy journeys into the heart of the recently-fallen city looking for his missing father. This Iliad retelling centers around the quiet, devastating moment after the soldiers have left and the fires within the rubble are beginning to cool.
If you’re looking for a slim, constrained story set within the world of the Odyssey, this is a solid bet. Hani, at eleven-years-old, must figure out the world that’s been left to him and decide what the future can offer, echoing perhaps one of the most resonant themes of retelling so many of us saw in IMAX this summer. Also, there’s a very wise donkey in the mix. Read my full review.
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