Customer Reviews

An Iliad (Vintage International)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am as close to a Homer purist as you will find: BA and MA in classics. Of course this book is no substitute for Homer's original: that narrative defined all western standards for storytelling. But I must give Baricco the highest marks for crystalizing and presenting (quite powerfully) the elements of the Iliad that are still relevant to human circumstances. We no longer believe that a pantheon of gods intimately involve themselves in the lives of a few heroic figures. It is therefore the job of the modern interpreter to find the purely human motivations that haven't changed over the millennia. This Baricco has done superbly. The characters do not all sound alike, as the other reviewer claims: that's just wrong. As one who has studied Homer line by line in the original, I have as much reason in theory to be bored or unimpressed by this project. But I am not. It made me think about the original in a new way, and that's no small feat.

Entertaining on its own it makes a wonderful text to practice your Italian if you read it along with the Italian version much of which is available on Google books, look for:

Omero, Iliade, on Google Books

[...]

I am an intermediate student of Italian. I find the translation from Italian to English to be quite literal and the Italian is straightforward so I recommend the two as a parallel reader. The fact that the original Homeric story is well known and well told helps.

I read this as a fan of Alessandro Baricco (ocean sea is a personal favorite). When I began reading I was surprised at the rhythm of the text, because it seemed quite different than the long flowing poetic sentences of Ocean Sea and Silk. Once I settled into his concise style, I appreciated the gruesome battles more than expected. In the end, I was introduced to a style and context of fiction literature that I was previously unfamiliar with. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in Greek Epics or warfare.

Powerful, moving, timely, and beautiful. Recommended reading for all those who appreciate history and all those who need to learn to appreciate how today's generations continue to repeat the tragedies of the past. Baricco ends his book with a challenge to us all. Accept the challenge.

This is not a translation of The Iliad as much as it a reimaging. We are presented with a view of the epic through a 21st century literary mirror. Baricco has taken a faithful interpretation of the epic (by Maria Grazia Ciani) and stripped away the intentional redundancies and the Gods and replaced it with deeply human voices without losing any of the depth, beauty or brutality of the original. This is a real accomplishment. I would not supplant THE Iliad for AN Iliad, but it is certainly a moving and wholly accurate experience for any reader.
Go ahead and buy it, and you will return to it and give it to others for years to come.

This is a great spin off the Iliad; the author takes you inside the minds, and feelings, of some of the major players in The Iliad. You will step inside their mind, and live through them...almost like being part of history. Very nice...

Having read Elizabeth Cook's Achilles, as well as just about every other updated Iliad story, I was excited immediately when I saw this on the new fiction bay. I was hoping the first-person narrations would bring some interesting subjectivity to the proceedings. Unfortunately, Baricco doesn't really bring anything new to the picture, aside from a few insights which, being printed in italics, are so distracting you can almost hear him go 'Look! I'm having an insight!'

I suppose people with short attention spans require a version of the epic that qualifies as 'a quick read', but I found myself itching for the poetic wonder of Robert Fagles' version ('No, no, here I sit by the ships... a useless, dead weight on the good green earth').

I give it three stars because, well, it's the Iliad, and the story still keeps me riveted even after having read it a billion times. I was disappointed, though.

I've tried reading the Iliad a couple of times and found myself reading excerpts and just what I needed to get by in my classics class in college. In other words, it was a chore to read. This book was a pleasure to read, and you probably won't believe this, frankly I'm having a hard time believing it myself, but I read this book in less than a day and a half. I couldn't put it down. Better than any hollywood movie, this version of The Trojan War, the original or rather based on the original I understand by Homer, has scenes that Stephen King fans could admire. Alessandro Baricco is a genious turning a tale that has bored many students down through the years into an epic tale that will haunt you many days after the last page has turned. The author mentions that he orally recited this book in Rome and that it was broadcast on radio there and that listeners were held spellbound. I believe that, as I too was held spellbound. However I feel I should mention that this tale is not for the faint of heart. Who knew the ancient Greeks were so violent and bloodthristy? If Hollywood did make a movie of this rendering they'd have to create a new rating for violence. The battle descriptions here are in your face and low down dirty. A good look at war in ancient times and probably not too far from the truth or violence of war today. This is one not to miss!!

Seeing this book on the shelves of the local Borders excited me greatly. I had always hoped the Iliad would have a good modern reincarnation, or at least some kind of new life breathed into it to counteracy the miserable movie "Troy." It's an epic worth retelling, with some of literature's greatest and oldest heroes.

This only magnified my disappointment when I delved into the book. I hope to read it again and be less disappointed, but I found it to be a long stretch of uniformly uninteresting and amateurish prose. The narration of Agamemnon, for example, sounds the same as the narrations of Achilles and all other characters. Achilles comes of as merely indignant, not irrational and wrathful, and Agamemnon's pompousness is similarly half-baked.

Obviously this is blasphemy to any classics or Homeric enthusiast. The Iliad is one of the earliest and greatest character studies. Making all the characters sound exactly alike was about the worst thing Barrico could do.

I might overlook some of this if the prose weren't so bland. But the story of the Iliad deserves better than what seems to be hack writing. (One description of a spear I found to be on par with internet "fan fiction," the type written by 15 year olds on their parents computers - it was honestly that poor.)

Perhaps it's a bad translation, if it was originally in Italian. However, that doesn't forgive the utter mediocrity of the text; translators worth their salt have breathed life into language as dense as Old English (see Heaney's "Beowulf" translation for a WORTHWHILE epic read). And moreover, Baricco's gimmick, the idea of a "modern Iliad," seems to be stretched thinly - especially without the support of interesting characters or style.

The reviews seem rave over this book, so I'll give it another chance and read it again. I only hope that there are better tries than this, and that this book, like the film "Troy," doesn't spoil the Iliad story for modern audiences. Haven't we done enough damage?

If you think you know all about the Iliad, Baricco's book will delight you with the insights it brings to this oft told tale. A retelling of the masterpiece from the perspective of the participants, this delightful volume is another great example of Baricco's imagination.