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The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Canongate U.S.

The Wanderer's Goran Miletic and Emerson Csorba attended the Wednesday April 10 performance of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad at the downtown Citadel Theatre. From one of Canada's most acclaimed writers comes this fresh and witty retelling of The Odyssey myth. Their review opens The Wanderer's week-long series great showing of The Penelopiad. The performance features indignant young woman, Penelope, whose famous husband (none other than Odysseus himself) sails away for a journey that leaves her alone for twenty years. So when I was walking by our local antique store and saw a cheap hardcover edition of her book Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus I thought I'd check it out. The Penelopiad tells the legendary story of Homer's Odyssey from the point of view of its hero Odysseus's intelligent and long-suffering wife, Penelope. (From the performance: The Penelopiad, published in 2005, is part of the Canongate's Myths series, which feature re-imaginings of myths by contemporary authors (the most recent is A.S.Byatt's Ragnarok). This is also the story of Penelope's twelve maids and their murder by Telemachus and Odysseus upon his return. The Penelopiad The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (The Myths Series) (9781455839261) Margaret Atwood, Laural Merlington. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood has been lurking in my sidebar for months, in fact it's still there, but it will be moving on shortly. As part of Canongate's 'Myths' series, Atwood was commissioned to re-tell a myth, and originally, she wrote, tried to re-write a Viking legend, before realising that she was “haunted” by the fate of the handmaids in the Odyssey, hanged arbitrarily by Telemachus, for having sex She decided that she would write a version of the tale which would address this problem, and tell Penelope's story as she waited and waited for Odysseus to come home from the Trojan War. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood. Ever since I heard about the Read-A-Myth Challenge, so kindly hosted by JoV and Bina, I have been looking forward to reading Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad. When Odysseus finally comes home after enduring hardships, overcoming monsters and sleeping with goddesses, he kills her suitors and – curiously – twelve of Penelope's maids. One of the stranger parts of Odyssey is Odysseus and Telemachus' slaughtering of Penelope's maids once they regain control of his kingdom. Odysseus spent most of his travels battling monsters and having sex (first with the goddess Circe, and then, when living with the nymph Calypso for seven years), while back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope wept and prayed and waited. Written in 2005 as part of the Canongate Myth series, The Penelopiad is often part, as I see it, is the view of feminism Atwood leaves us with in The Penelopiad.