Medea [Hardcover]

Christa Wolf (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 1998

Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In her gripping new novel, Christa Wolf explodes this myth, revealing a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle.

Medea, driven by her conscience to leave her corrupt homeland, arrives in Corinth with her husband, the hero Jason. He is welcomed, but she is branded the outsider-and then she discovers the appalling secret behind the king's claim to power. Unwilling to ignore the horrifying truth about the state, she becomes a threat to the king and his ruthless advisors; abandoned by Jason and made a public scapegoat, she is reviled as a witch and a murderess.

Long a sharp-eyed political observer, Christa Wolf transforms this ancient tale into a startlingly relevant commentary on our times. Possessed of the enduring truths so treasured in the classics, and yet with a thoroughly contemporary spin, her Medea is a stunningly perceptive and probingly honest work of fiction.

With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood.  Translated from the German by John Cullen.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Pity poor Medea--at least, that's what German novelist Christa Wolf would like you to do. True, the woman's reputation is not good: she stands accused of betraying her father, killing her brother, and then serving up her own children as the main course to their unsuspecting father when he divorces her for another woman. Still, the story of Medea has always been told by men; in Wolf's version, she finally has a woman as her advocate. And advocate Wolf does--in this revisiting of the old tale, Medea is truly a doomed and tragic heroine, closer to the subject of Wolf's previous book, Cassandra than to the murderous slave to passion she has always been portrayed as. Though many of the plot points remain the same--Jason's journey to Colchis to claim the golden fleece, his subsequent flight with Medea, and the death of her brother, Apsyrtus--the circumstances are turned on their heads. Medea's betrayal of her father, Aeëtes, for example, and elopement with Jason have less to do with wreckless passion than her secret knowledge that Apsyrtus died at Aeëtes's hand, the victim of dynastic competition.

In Wolf's retelling, Medea is no mere tale of scorned passion and bloody revenge but rather a complex weave of power and politics. In it Jason is the pawn in a greater struggle between King Creon, who harbors his own nasty secret, and Medea, a wise woman who knows too much about what goes on in Creon's kingdom. In limning the life and death pas-de-deux of these two strong characters, Wolf also examines themes of loyalty, sacrifice, and the effects of political oppression on personal relationships. Interesting enough in its own right, Medea takes on added piquancy when read in light of revelations in the wake of German reunification that Wolf was, for many years, a Stasi informant. In revisiting the much-maligned Medea's motivations, Christa Wolf may, in fact, be offering an accounting of her own.

From Kirkus Reviews

German novelist Wolf's discursive retelling of the familiar Greek legend, a logical outgrowth from her earlier novel Cassandra (1984), ispace Margaret Atwood, who contributes an informative ``Introduction''a humorless and essentially predictable political allegory envisioning the reviled sorceress and murderer (of her children) as a victim of male arrogance and sexual insecurity. Medea's homeland Colchis is a ``darker'' counterpart to the kingdom of Corinth, a self-aggrandizing state that brutally distorts truth to justify its imperialistic crimes. Wolf offers a chorus of ``Voices'' herethe eponymous heroine, her weak-willed adventurer husband Jason, and other players in the drama of Corinth's power struggleto chronicle the scapegoating of an insubordinate female goaded to become ``immoderate . . . a Fury, just what the Corinthians needed her to be.'' Overwrought, and markedly inferior to Wolf's better fiction. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese (March 16, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385490607
• ISBN-13: 978-0385490603
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #133,037 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Welcomed and Gratifying Reinterpretation of Myth, July 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Medea (Hardcover)

Ever since James Frazer and Joseph Campbell, but moreso Robert Graves, I've been waiting for the 'real' story of mythological characters like Hera, say, or the Medusa; Crista Wolf's "Cassandra" and now "Medea" take me happily in that direction. I know Ms Wolf has a personal and political agenda. Admittedly, I had trouble getting started, largely because of similarities of voice in the early chapters, but once the plot begins I had no trouble following it and Medea herself down it's dark labyrinths. And I felt thoroughly gratified with her and at her sentiments at the end. Who hasn't reached that point, where the only gesture meaningful and appropriate is a raised middle digit--figuaratively speaking, of course? And who more than Medea has better cause? Except maybe the Medusa. What about it Ms Wolf?

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely first class story telling, November 11, 2000

By 

Andrew Ng Hock Soon "just a reader" (Perth, Western Australia Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Medea (Hardcover)

How can anyone call this novel flat, I cannot understand. In less than 200 pages, Wolf has brilliantly captured the utter depravity than mankind can sink to through its own bigotry, hypocrisy, lying, selfishness and sense of self-preservation. Wolf has taken Darwin's survival of the fittest theory to its immoral extreme and has exploited the Lacanian objet art to its most devastating use. A society so enveloped in its own sense of emptiness and vileness, leading them to sacrifice a woman as an expiation of its evil, can only be beautifully and tragically rendered by a mistress story teller as Wolf. Atwood's introduction tells no lies, and I highly recommend this reading to anyone who is into the classics, contemporary culture, social studies and philosophy. This is Wolf's first novel that I have read and it most definitely will not be the last.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Retelling of a Powerful Tale, December 3, 2001

By 

E. Dale Smith (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Medea (Hardcover)

As a devout fan of the Medea story, I was a little doubtful as I opened the book. At first, the heightened language struck me as being counterproductive to the humanity that Wolfe seemed to strive for in the protagonist, but, as the story progressed, I found myself lured in by the characters, the basic approach, and the added details. I thought the chapter by Princess Glauce, a character often avoided or even mistreated in many versions, was particularly insightful. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves this tale or interpretive approaches to traditional mythology.