The Golden Ass
Ratings7
Average rating4
15
Ratings7
Average rating4
Written towards the end of the second century AD, The Golden Ass tells the story of the many adventures of a young man whose fascination with witchcraft leads him to be transformed into a donkey. The bewitched Lucius passes from owner to owner - encountering a desperate gang of robbers and being forced to perform lewd 'human' tricks on stage - until the Goddess Isis finally breaks the spell and Lucius is initiated into her cult. Apuleius' enchanting story has inspired generations of writers such as Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Keats with its dazzling combination of allegory, satire, bawdiness and sheer exuberance, and remains the most continuously and accessibly amusing book to have survived from Classical antiquity.
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The Golden Ass was listed in my 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die book so I figured I give it a chance and...I really enjoyed it. Apart from it being recommended by that book my East Asian Literature professor also suggested it after I told her I enjoyed Kafka's Metamorphosis.
What really surprised me about this book is how smooth and easy it is to read. For something that was written so long ago, the language used is very accessible to modern readers (of course it might help that it's a translation...). I didn't get deep into analyzing this book but I did notice some outstanding themes about infidelity and religion.
The book barely focused on the main character and was more a collection of short stories a la Arabian Nights. I think this fact helped me enjoy the book because it's impossible to get bored when there are so many different plotlines. My only complaint about the short stories is that a good deal of them seemed to be about the wickedness of women (some main female characters are evil as well) and I questioned the author's fixated hatred of my gender.
My favorite part of the book is Lucius's journey as a donkey. It was interesting to see an animal's fate from that animal's eyes. He gets tossed around from owner to owner and some are cruel and some are kind. I even got a little emotional when he was being abused by one of his owners (stupid kid!) There's even bestiality which I think was supposed to be some kind of social commentary but since I wasn't analyzing...it just kinda creeped me out. (I think the message was basically “rich people be crazy”).
The ending of this book seemed, at first, out of place and clumsy to me. Then I realized “ohhh this was the point of the whole book.” Religion doesn't get a whole lot of mention until the final chapters where it's all Lucius cares about. At first I was annoyed by a “religion solves everything” ending but then I realized this is ancient religion we're talking about and the mythos aspect became interesting to me. I liked how the Goddess mentioned all her different names in different cultures and how the Egyptian name was her true name. I've never heard it explained that way and I thought that was clever (as in, all cultures believe in her but some just call her the wrong name).
All in all, this was a pretty easy and enjoyable read. I'm glad I read it for pleasure and not for school however because it's very dense. I am a little curious to the meaning of some parts so I might just ask my friend google what the scholars are saying.
