Circe

After seeing Circe as the Goodread readers choice for best fantasy book of 2018, I knew I would need to check it out. The story itself follows Circe, a Greek goddess, nymph, and daughter of Helios. The prose is also striking. Each scene feels epic in nature somehow – partially from prose, but also because they're populated with familiar characters - Charybdis, Odysseus, Daedalus and too many others to name.

If you have an interest in Greek Mythology you will enjoy Circe immensely. Madeline Miller knows here classics and weaves a tale of many different gods and men together into something completely new and original while staying true to the characters. It's a retelling of the same history, but from a new point of view – shedding light on areas often passed over. If you're interested in Greek Mythology, you will likely love this one as much as I did.

My bestie recommended this back to me when it came out, and I have no idea why I didn't just read it immediately! She and I are literary "twin flames" (thanks, Megan Fox, for the parlance), so she was 100% accurate in her educated guess I would love this. 10/10; no notes. Read the last third really slowly because I didn't want it to end!! Epic, intimate, searing.

I don't think this quote from the final pages can be captured in its full glory out of context, but it was rattling around in my head for days afterward and came up in another book club when someone was talking about the tightrope between nihilistic despair and hope: "A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.... How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom?.... Circe, he says, it will be alright.... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive."

The highest praise I can give to Circe is to simply describe, simply and without exaggeration, how I felt when I finished the book. It felt like a heavy weight on my chest, and like every feeling of loneliness and powerlessness and fear had been dug up from the deep places I had tried to bury them in. I put the book down and immediately headed out into the rain to walk to a bar to be around people and to connect to my own worry-worn rosary made up of clichés like we met and talked all night and I took one look and knew.

That's what happened.

Circe, whose “official story” as a sexually tempting sea-witch is contained in a brief interlude in the Odyssey, is born as one of the least powerful immortals. Her family is not kind to her, and although she has a powerful father, this does not give her protection. Instead, it makes her a particularly vulnerable (easy to use) pawn in a game in which she has no place and cannot win. Things happen to her, she learns lessons. Ultimately, she has to choose between listening to what everyone around her tells her is her place, or, taking the lonely road of learning to listen and trust herself, and therefore discover her own power.

I saw a lot of myself in Circe's story. Although it turns out that, seen with hindsight and self-confidence, there was less to fear than I believed, I too felt different and removed from my family. But there is only so much kinship with Circe I can claim, because a lot of the emotional dynamics explored in this book involve family abuse and the violence that men enact on women. Madeline Miller writes in this wonderful, poetic register that is often punctuated by beautiful aphorisms, and they resonate, of course, not because Circe's experience is so extraordinary but because it's so common.

As a confused high-schooler, I took Latin classes, and as a confused young adult I chose a college that put a big emphasis on studying “the Classics.” Homer's world of wars and gods and glory and vengeance never came alive to me for two reasons: I was not a good student and spent no time completing reading assignments, and because the whole toxic-masculinity template, this foundational ethos that fueled scores of empires great and small seemed so stupid. Who can kill the most people is a question like who can run the fastest or who can lift the heaviest thing: useful to know in limited contexts but not very useful to most parts of life and definitely a poor indicator of divine favor or ruling authority. What Miller does so well is take the same stories (dominant, masculine, exterior focused), and retell them through the eyes of the other, who is usually left out of the tale (inferior, feminine, interior focused). It's a wonderful way of queering the text: reading Homer with the values that his culture tried their best to suppress. I may or may not return to the Iliad or Odyssey, but even if I do I imagine it will be Miller's Circe, Miller's Achilles, Miller's Agamemnon, that will be the “real” versions of the character to me, not Homer's. I hope that is the sweetest victory of all.

Circe is best known for turning Odysseus's men into pigs when they landed on her island on their journey back from the Trojan War, and then being persuaded by Odysseus to change them back again. She was the daughter of the Titan Helios and a nymph in Greek mythology. She fell in love with a mortal sailor, Glaucus, and turned a fellow nymph, Scylla, into a sea monster (who also appears in the Odyssey), out of jealousy. Madeline Miller's book is a retelling of Circe's story from the point of view of Circe herself.

I've often wondered why the stories of the Greek gods always portray them as so invested in mortals— not only invested in what mortals are doing in general, but often having favorites among mortals, as Odysseus was a favorite of Athena's. This book offers an answer I hadn't thought of, as it looks at an immortal woman's struggle to grow and make a satisfactory life for herself. Mortals have something that the gods don't: an arc of story, rather than a continuous line of episodes following each other without end. On one hand, since it's us mortals telling the story, we may just be consoling ourselves that even though we have to die, we've really got the better deal. On the other hand, it's interesting. Does an immortal life have meaning?

i'm absolutely obsessed with this book. it's so interesting and fascinating! i really love madeline miller's writing style, it's poetic and unique and it fits the story perfectly.
madeline miller's story telling is absolutely exceptional. i love how she introduces those super famous characters as if we had never heard of them before. i particularly loved the passage about medea.
if you love or just appreciate greek mythology i would 100% recommend reading circe. i learned so many new things about greek mythology and it made me see stories that i already knew a through a completely different vision which was such an interesting experience.
it's so refreshing to see retellings of myths through the eyes of a woman who has been portrayed so pathetically in original writings. madeline miller did justice to circe's character.
i also really loved the commentary on mortality and immortality and circe's connection to those concepts. the ending was perfect and it made me cry because of how touched i felt.
anyways, read this book!! now!!

Circe was my April Book of the Month club pick, and WOW was it epic. I haven't read Song of Achilles, but I just put a hold on it with my library, because this book was amazing. So amazing, in fact, that it sent me into a bit of a reading slump - what book could follow up this masterwork?

This is actually going to be a pretty short review because I'm just in awe of this book. Circe begins as a somewhat naive child in her father's household, unaware of her own power until her brother points it out to her. For those powers, she is banished to a deserted island, but her powers only grow from there. We meet many figures of Greek mythology - from gods and goddesses to mortals and monsters like Scylla and the Minotaur.

I just don't even know how to properly review this book other than it was amazing. If you like Greek mythology at ALL, you should read this book. It's captivating.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I really loved this book. The character of Circe is wonderfully written as the outsider who discovers that she can harness the power of witchcraft and metamorphosis. Miller writes about the gods and heroes in a fresh way. I also like the way that she portrayed Odysseus - like many of her characters she shows the hero as the mortal, flawed man. I hope that she wins many awards for this as this is really the kind of lit fic that I think deserves it - both brilliantly written and completely readable and resonant with current readers despite the fantasy setting.

This was incredible! Miller somehow managed to meld an eons-long epic with an intensely personal character study, told in an improbable synthesis of Homeric and modern language. She generally uses quite simple and relatable phrasing, but also employs her own version of classical epithets (think “wine-dark sea” and “bright-eyed Athena”), and generally crafts her prose so you just feel that this is a goddess speaking, not a mere mortal.

The story is somewhat long, and sometimes languid, but it never drags. We get a sense of Circe's timeless isolation, but with a compulsion to turn the page and find out what happens next.

Fans of Greek mythology will be delighted to see so many tales woven (heh) so skillfully into this first-person account. Miller really made old stories come alive for me, as well as filling me in on details I had never encountered before. I also felt her representation of gods and their otherness was outstanding - the gods are freaking scary and capricious, and Circe's journey away from their point of view is compelling. (I guess some purists might protest at license taken with some of the ancient characters, but I highly recommend simply accepting this as one of many iterations on these myths.)

A special shout-out to the audio book, read with beautiful skill by Perdita Weeks. She absolutely makes Circe come to life, and is just mellifluous and pleasant to listen to as well!

Great modern epic

I love how this reads like an epic poem, and yet still feels modern. The writing is beautifully I descriptive and gives great characterization to each god and hero as soon as you meet them.

I've read or am at least familiar with a lot of the mythological stories referenced here, but seeing them from this perspective as Circe weaves in and out of the events was really fun.

3/5 ⭐⭐⭐

La mitología griega, una de mis grandes pasiones ya lo sabéis y este libro es eso, una historia que hace un resumen de los distintos mitos a grandes rasgos y desde otro punto de vista...y bueno poco más. Este libro es eso, una serie de sucesos y personajes que van apareciendo en la historia, a veces sin venir mucho a cuento.

La historia comienza bien, conocemos a Circe, su carácter, su familia y a un montón de Dioses, se nos sitúa muy bien en el momento y en el espacio. Todos los personajes tienen su papel en el desarrollo de la personalidad de nuestra protagonista que se nos presenta al principio como una mujer dócil y tímida que vive postrada (literalmente) a los pies de su padre el titán Helios.

Nos habla de la crueldad de los dioses, de la divinidad, de la inmortalidad, de la falta de sentimientos y consideración de estos, y poco más, nada de lo que no se haya hablado ya en la mitad de los retelling de este tipo.

¿Feminista? No veo el feminismo en este libro por ninguna parte, tan solo en el hecho que este contando la historia una mujer, pero una mujer que es un mero espectador de lo que pasa a su alrededor, que ve como los hombres a su alrededor hacen cosas pero ella sigue encerrada en su isla sin formar parte de la historia. Tampoco he visto la sororidad por ninguna parte, tan solo muchas mujeres que se odian y se critican porque todo en su mundo gira entorno a la belleza. Pasifae y Penelope podrían haber tenido unos papeles más relevantes a la hora del desarrollo del personaje de Circe que se han malgastado completamente.

Por como lo venden “una heroína. Una hechicera. Una mujer que encuentra su poder” pues te imaginas una prota badass, que utilizase sus poderes para cambiar el mundo o algo por estilo, pero vamos que no pasa nada de nada, he estado 250 páginas viendo como Circe veía su vida pasar y ella tan solo se sentaba ahí y observaba.

¿Qué más puedo decir? El libro está bien escrito, la prosa de la autora es maravillosa lo que hace que este libro no sea un completo fiasco y me ha gustado bastante el final, pero eso es todo. Lo describirá como insulso y aburrido, una lectura quizá para comenzar a tener una vista general de la mitología griega.

I had to restrain myself from chucking this book into the fire after closing the final chapter. If you've never learned anything about mythology perhaps you may find something of interest in this otherwise bland, empty novel.

‘Circe' more closely resembles a checklist of events and characters which Miller ticks off a list - with absolutely no regard for character development or any ounce of originality in her retelling.