The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Stone Blind: Medusa's Story by Natalie Haynes

I have loved many of the feminist retellings of Greek Myth. My favorite authors include Madeline Miller, Pat Barker and Natalie Haynes. I am less impressed by Jennifer Saint.

Years ago I read the Iliad in an all male book group and had a bit to say about the violence towards women. My comments weren’t really heard and I decided to leave the group.

Reading Natalie Hayne’s A Thousand Ships, which focused on multiple female points of few was liberating and enlightening all at once. I have read the book once and listened to it once. I love how Haynes narrates Penelope’s chapters with acidity and frustration.

Hayne’s Pandora’s Jar- Women in Greek Myth encouraged me to read more Greek Tragedy and attend a Greek Tragedy short course at our University.

I therefore eagerly anticipated Stone Blind and read my copy on the day of release. While I enjoyed how Haynes expanded the Medusa chapter from Pandora’s Jar to tell a well rounded tale. The book was not as good as it’s predecessors.
The book’s strong point is that it questions what makes a monster monstrous and what makes a hero heroic. However, some of the characters (Perseus and Athene) are not well rounded at all.

It’s a good book but not a great book and I will be surprised if it is shortlisted

I agree with you, Lisa. Miller, Barker and Haynes are all great. Saint’s books lack..something.

This was my third book by Haynes- A Thousand Ships and Pandora’s Jar were my previous reads. I loved this one. I agree that Athene and Perseus could have been fleshed out more- but Haynes got her point across re: Medusa. I’ve always thought she got a bad rap.

One of the points made in these feminist retellings that must continue to be drilled, no matter the origin of the myth is how a hero gets there. How many innocent people, creatures, “monsters”, planets are hurt so that he can complete one quest?
(The extrapolation to real life being a bit obvious)

I think Haynes did a nice job of that here.

Yes Tracy. The origin of the “hero” and who and what is harmed on his path to glory is important.

I know that Haynes and Miller have degrees in the classics. I think that Saint does not and her novels lack depth

I started reading this a while ago and just couldn't get into it. I am not sure why... I will be going back to it but not massively excited to do so. ( I really love the Waterstones cover art though:))

This one just did not work for me, which was a surprise, as I thought A Thousand Ships was very good. I felt that there was something off about the narrative style and so many of the characters were incredibly unappealing. I can't help but think that this was longlisted because Haynes is not only a previously-shortlisted author but also a prior judge. I do hope it is not shortlisted.

that’s normally more of a Goldsmith Prize thing (in fact that’s a good chunk of the shortlist some years) but I did have some similar thoughts

I have to say I thought a Thousand Ships was a little weak compared to Miller and Barker - but I do have a lot of time for the author as a broadcaster, writer, compère etc and if she is shortlisted she will make a great shortlist reading panellist.

I agree with you about Haynes as compared with Miller and Barker, GY. I am wondering whether we are getting over-saturated in the retelling of the Greek myths genre.

Cindy wrote: "I am wondering whether we are getting over-saturated in the retelling of the Greek myths genre."

I think we are, but my favorite book from last year was a reincarnation of a Greek myth so I think it just depends on whether it's well done or not.

It also depends on how much prior knowledge a reader has of the original stories. Classical mythology is one of my 'things' and I find most of the recent so-called feminist retellings far less radical than their incarnations in, say, Ovid's Metamorphoses or, often, Athenian tragedy where whole plays are named after female characters so they're hardly either invisible or voiceless, even when written by male playwrights.

The one exception that I love is Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, and I also think Barker does a good retelling of the Trojan story, though the first book works better for me than the second.

I think what worked for me about Cassandra was the use of a poetic sensibility and a Homeric sense of preordained tragedy as a lens through which to explore things like gender fluidity, war, masculinity, grief, etc. In other words, the preoccupations of the 20th/21st centuries were recast in an ancient and timeless mold.

I get the sense that Haynes, Barker, et al., are doing the opposite - using a modern voice and perspective to retell an ancient story.

That's an interesting analysis of difference, David.

I'd say that classical civilisations, as well as the sixteenth century, had far freer ideas of gender fluidity than we sometimes do : just look at Tiresias, or gender in Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and so on. This kind of thinking that we label liberal and progressive isn't historically linear in any simple way.

What you say are 20/21 century preoccupations, were equally or even more so the case in certainly classical Greece and Rome - not surprising as they were almost constantly at war! Ideas of masculinity and 'heroism' were constantly being interrogated, contested and subverted.

All of which is context for my dissatisfaction with contemporary retellings such as those of Miller and Haynes as they're usually more simple and didactic than the more thoughtful or questioning originals

Those are great points RC. When I said 20/21st century preoccupations, I mean issues we consider relevant today but reframed to read almost as an episode from Homer, in part to give wider perspective and shake off a didactic approach. Since the prose was quite poetic (bordering on prose-poetry), it's hard to make concrete statements about it since the whole thing felt a bit ephemeral.

I read Miller's Achilles retelling a few years ago and enjoyed it, but I don't know if my original impression would hold up on a rereading. With other retellings of Greek myths (Barker, Haynes, etc.), I wonder if it's more a project to strip away 19th and 20th century interpretations that have made their way into popular culture than a critique of the original.

David wrote: "I wonder if it's more a project to strip away 19th and 20th century interpretations that have made their way into popular culture than a critique of the original."

Interesting point. It might be hard to generalise.

Maybe the Medusa story, that's the subject of Stone Blind, in the popular imagination centres on the 'monstrous' aspect of the Medusa head and her back story has been lost or never really entered into popular culture? But she has, famously, been used by Hélène Cixous in a positive and complex way.

But Miller's Circe does something quite different: it takes a female character who is powerful and obstructive to the hero in Homer and de-claws her so that all she wants is to be cosily domestic. That seems a strange betrayal of the original conception of Circe to me.

I found this entertaining but not that much more - I think Haynes for me is too interested in cramming in as much as she can of the myths for my tastes rather than using them as a starting point

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I love the Greek myths and dramas and plays, but I agree that there are too many retellings lately. I also agree with GY that Haynes is great fun to listen to, but her books aren’t as much fun. I was a bit disappointed, only a bit because I didn’t expect more than a good story, in Stone Blind, on a book snob scale it’s a 3 star for me.
The best part of Stone Blind was the cover on the ARCs of the profile of an attractive woman yelling, her rage is captured in that picture.

I share David’s love of Call Me Cassandra, but that was not a retelling or novelized version, the protagonist believed himself to be a reincarnation of Cassandra.

I say I love the Greeks, but I listened to a very brief podcast episode yesterday about Zeus lusting after his daughter….I can’t recall her name, but he watched her bathe, transformed his appearance and raped her. It gave me pause and I asked myself why I’m spending so much time reading these stories in which woman after woman after woman is raped? I know they’re classics and they are of their time, but much like the debate about rewriting Dahl instead of moving on from him to less offensive stories, maybe I should move on from the Greeks to a period in classical literature when rape was not just a matter of course.
I would appreciate someone offering a defense of continuing to read Greek classics.

Is it possible that “rape” has been misinterpreted? Could it possibly mean seduced under false pretenses, which is still awful, but at least there is a hint of consent?

WndyJW wrote: "Is it possible that “rape” has been misinterpreted? Could it possibly mean seduced under false pretenses, which is still awful, but at least there is a hint of consent?"

In Latin the verb is rapere which can mean 'to rape, to ravish' but also 'to be carried away' which can also have non-sexual connotations. For example, in the Aeneid, when Venus carries Aeneas off the battlefield for his own protection, this is the verb used.

Sorry, Wendy, I don't think that implies any form of consent (Aeneas, as a warrior, doesn't want to be removed from the fight by his goddess mother!) but it might not always imply direct sexual activity.

But these are supremely patriarchal cultures where women do not have standing as legal entities. In classical Athens they were not even citizens though they passed citizenship on to their sons.

Rape in the myths can also be read as a code for power and dominance. I would also say that some retellings of the rape myths e.g. Ovid's Metamorphoses use the stories to expose the abuse of power by the Olympian gods, a kind of stand-in for the exploitation of Augustus and the Julio-Claudians who reintroduce hereditary monarchy by stealth. Many Roman writers in this period were republicans (not in the US sense!)

Thanks for the explaining rapere, even though there is no way it doesn’t mean forced. I don’t know why that particular story of Zeus and his daughter bothered me so much more than the numerous other stories of Zeus forcing himself on women, but I was so repulsed I turned the podcast off.

I enjoyed Stone Blind but it didn’t offer anything new to the whole myth retelling genre. For those who are interested, Delphi by Clare Pollard is an interesting take on this trend - it’s not a retelling but the main character becomes obsessed with Classical ways of seeing the future. Her style reminded me of Jenny Offill’s Weather.

Agreed - that was an interesting mash up of Offill fragmentary novel, Classic novel and Lockdown novel.

Delphi does sound interesting!

I liked Delphi a lot and the way it thinks about parallels between ancient forms of augury and our own attempts to predict and control the future from astrology to political polls. It was also interesting to relive the pandemic in London with some distance.

That’s what makes me hesitate to put on my Wish List. Is it too much of it’s time or is the pandemic just a background for the story of the woman trying to predict her family’s future?

I found it helpful in processing what we've all been through with some distance of fiction and time.

Ultimately, it's about chaos and how we have to live when we don't know what's coming around the corner.

Ok. It’s going on my Wish List.

Edit: ordered from indie shop on Cleveland’s west side. Thanks, Suzanne, GY, and RC.

Probably too late to say now I had a few issues with the book (one fairly fundamental) ! But you can read my spoiler-free review for those

Very good review, as usual and it actually most of your review made me glad I ordered it. My guess is Pollard stayed away from monotheistic, contemporary religions to avoid offending any practitioners or dissenters, and she didn’t get into the validity of math and science because 1) she’s not fluent in mathematical predictors or statistics and/or 2) she’s focused on the predicting not based on reason.
I’m not a maths person by nature so I probably wouldn’t have noticed the lack of math and science.

I DNF this one - I usually love greek myths and Natalie Haynes but this one felt weak and muddled.

I was surprised to see it longlisted and will be surprised if its shortlisted.

I thought The Shadow of Perseus was a better version of what Haynes was trying to accomplish here.

Great to see your thoughts, Sammi. It's nice to have someone with different views from most of the group. Last year we could have used a 5-star defense of Opal and Nev.