(06/09/22)
After rereading The Song of Achilles and finally reading Circe, I picked up another retelling that had a few similar characters, so it looked like a nice follow up. But that thinking may have been my biggest mistake. Jumping from that absolutely enchanting prose of Miller into this one was a bit of a slap in the face for me and it probably isn't even the book's fault. The writing here is good, but Miller's standard is somewhere up on damn Olympus for me and it did cast its shadow. For that, going from Circe to Ariadne was like loving a god and then having him switched for a mortal.
I don't like to compare like this, but that was all I was doing the whole time, so I can't just ignore it. The book managed to grip me after the whole Minotaur part, where I was finally not completely sure what's going to happen. By that I suppose the more you know about Ariadne from myths, the less you will enjoy this book.
But one thing that I loved and will always do, is that it didn't skip over female suffering in various hero-centred myths and it showed well that misogynistic treatment they get and hideous ways they suffer under and for men. And still, even when the stories of women did come forward here, I would not call this a feministic retelling. Ariadne made one big choice in the whole book, and even then other people helped more than she did. Otherwise she was just being carried from suffering under one man to another or passively living in her bubble, completely ignoring everything and everyone. It felt more like a tragedy of another woman suffering. And it's fine, just call it what it is.
Neither was it a story about sisterhood. There were two sisters, yes, and at first, their bond was beautiful, but somehow later they didn't care enough to learn more about each other's fates and when they finally met again, it felt flat and the only thing that they could talk about were men. My problem probably is, that nothing was as it was described – Ariadne is not feministic, Phaedra is headstrong only until she doesn't prove to be. And so the problem of the writing is that it is describing things, but not showing them. Only the view on Theseus was actually fresh in a way that I liked – it's nice to see a self-centred hero that is not so good after all. Dionysus on the other hand… I did like him here, but the change later was a bit drastic, so I don't think Saint managed well with this version of him and he could be so much more interesting and complex.
Instead, again, I longed for Miller to be writing this. She would create characters that would make all the sense, packed in a prose that would read itself, show Dionysus in his both merry and joyful but also mysterious and brutal form (I would so love to see this god written by her) and Ariadne wouldn't be blind to everything. Or not. Either way, I probably wouldn't be so unsure about it all as I am now about how to rate this. I did enjoy reading it, sometimes less and sometimes more, but it has its problems and I was looking for more.
All in all, maybe this book was like a god after all – with a cover that will enchant you, but only for you to realize that its inside is not as great as you expected.
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