Invasion of the Greeks & Romans!
August 30th, 2007
I read Homer’s The Iliad many, many moons ago. I somehow connect that memory with sleep. From what I remember the epic focused on decade-long war between Greece & the city of Troy - all over a woman (Helen), the fall of Hector, the quarrel between stubborn Achilles and proud Agamemnon and many, many pages of interference from the pesky Greek gods. All exciting stuff, I assure you, but still I remember sleep. That is until Alessandro Baricco’s very ambitious and keenly successful retelling. You may remember me raving about the Italian writer and his very elegant and sensual novella, Silk. An Iliad, quite slim at 176 pages, reimagines our civilization’s greatest tale of war. He recreates the siege of Troy with such intensity, I almost fell into the subway platform reading it. Gone is the archaic language, Gods who keep reappearing for no other reason but to annoy me, and here is a very plain story about war - why we enter into a war and why we keep fighting. Baricco makes some critical observations regarding our engagement in Iraq in the novel’s afterward. For anyone who wants to brush up on their Homer and wants a fascinating, very human story, I recommend An Iliad.
From ancient Greece to Rome (391 A.D. to the present), is M.J. Rose’s ninth and perhaps finest novel, The Reincarnationist (full disclosure: M.J. and I are friends). Although I am about half-way through the novel, I simply cannot put this down. From B&N: Photographer Josh Ryder is among the casualties of a terrorist bomb explosion in Rome. But his symptoms are baffling; instead of predictable post-traumatic stress, he is experiencing vivid flashbacks of pre-Christian Italy. Puzzled and troubled by these visual seizures, he begins to connect them with stories of past-life memories gathered by researchers at the Phoenix Institute. Like an archaeological dig, his probe takes him deep into the past, but it also exposes him to threats unmistakably present.
I’ll have more to say about M.J.’s terrific novel when I’ve finished it and she’ll be a guest on Writers Revealed on 9.9.07. However, in the interim, visit her site for more info.
Oscar Feldman, the “Great Man,” was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject—the female nude. When he died in 2001, he left behind a wife, Abigail; an autistic son; and a sister, Maxine, herself a notable abstract painter—all duly noted in The New York Times obituary.
Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word “sissy” on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin’s long road north towards celebrity begins. 
If, sooner or later, we all face the challenge or the pleasure of eating alone, then Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant provides the perfect set of instructions. In this unique collection, twenty-six writers and foodies invite readers into their kitchens to reflect on the secret meals they make for themselves when no one else is looking: the indulgent truffled egg sandwich, the comforting bowl of black beans, the bracing anchovy fillet on buttered toast.
