Circe
Madeline Miller
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Circe
Madeline Miller
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Miller’s novel charms like a good bedtime story; she understands our inexhaustible appetite for myths starring our favorite characters, and that we don’t want these stories to end.
As with her previous novel, the great skill here is the way Miller gives voice to a previously muted perspective in the classics, forging a great romance from the scraps left to us by the ancients. If The Song of Achilles recovered a half-buried homosexual love story from the Iliad, Circe gives us a feminist slant on the Odyssey.
...Miller has determined, in her characterization of this most powerful witch, to bring her as close as possible to the human — from the timbre of her voice to her intense maternal instincts.
Although she writes in prose, Miller hews to the poetic timber of the epic, with a rich, imaginative style commensurate to the realm of immortal beings sparked with mortal sass.
Miller is clearly on intimate terms with the Greek poem. The character of Circe only occupies a few dozen lines of it, but Miller extracts worlds of meaning from Homer's short phrases.
Miller beautifully voices the experiences of the legendary sorceress Circe.
...[a] gorgeous and gimlet-eyed follow-up to her Orange Prize-winning first novel.
…Circe by Madeline Miller…thrilled me. This young classicist has brought Greek mythology to life … her elaboration of mostly inexplicable deeds will make you think about the Greek gods and the humans they dealt with in a completely new way. Indeed, by the time you finish this novel, you will be amazed by what she has done with the characters of Odysseus and Telemachus. Based on the facts as we have them, Miller’s version of events makes emotional and artistic sense. Circe, like its main character, is magical..
Miller's Circe is not exactly the entire Odyssey retold through a new point of view. The novel is indeed a response to the myth of Odysseus because, through Circe, we see the hero very differently. This is definitely Circe's story — one that has had various conflicting versions over time — with the Odyssey as the backdrop, or the side-show.
Circe’s tale lacks the sweeping arc and central romance of Achilles. Her narrative is more episodic, a string of feuds and love affairs occasionally bisected by myth’s greatest hits (Prometheus, the Minotaur, Helen of Troy). But Miller, with her academic bona fides and born instinct for storytelling, seamlessly grafts modern concepts of selfhood and independence to her mystical reveries of smoke and silver, nectar and bones. And if the Circe that emerges from her imagination isn’t exactly human — technically, she can’t be — she is divine..
The novel is at its most incisive when Circe must reckon with worlds in which she does not quite belong.
[Miller] unfurls the story of the legendary witch from Homer’s Odyssey with lyric intensity.
Miller knows that, as with the best magical realism, the real power doesn’t lie in the ostensible facts of the narrative, but in its psychology. And that is where Miller anchors her story – in the emotional life of a woman.
Bestowing modern feminist mores on classical texts may seem unwise, but it’s marvellous to see this Circe emerge through the haze, sympathetic and ringing true to 21st-century motivations.
Madeline Miller's re-imagining of the witch Circe from The Odyssey makes for an intriguing, feminist adventure novel that is perfectly suited for the #TimesUp moment.
Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside 'the tonic of ordinary things.' A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells. Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters..
It took me a while to get around to Circe, Madeline Miller’s extremely popular 2018 novel told from the perspective of the island-dwelling witch from The Odyssey. Friends had raved about it circa its publication. I’d read one page and put it down, finding it too hard to get into the narrator’s formal, serious Ancient Greekness. Then, two years later, novels featuring contemporary people stopped being able to hold my attention. Characters went to bars and museums, rode the subway, walked around with their faces uncovered. I couldn’t relate. Time to read about an immortal demigoddess with the power to turn men into pigs!.
Weaving together Homer’s tale with other sources, Miller crafts a classic story of female empowerment. She paints an uncompromising portrait of a superheroine who learns to wield divine power while coming to understand what it means to be mortal..