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“When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is ‘I want to tell the story again.’ My work is full of cover versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Heracles takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom, too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere.” -- from Jeanette Winterson’s Foreword to Weight
Winterson's embrace of the mythic landscape is evident in her rich imagery: Atlas, freed from his burden, "kicking the stars like stones"; or cautiously pushing back the peeling wooden gate of his overgrown garden. Her most dazzling flight of imagination, however, is the introduction of poor Laika, the dog sent into space by the Russians in 1957. In Winterson's telling, this absurdly unlikely image is so right, so cathartic, that one can well imagine the old myth having waited for this element to complete it.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
pui ho ip
reviewed Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles on March 22, 2012
Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
This book is a disease-ridden hooker in a business suit. It's a sand pail made of tissue paper. All pretense and no heart, this retelling of centuries old myths features heaping spoonfuls of stereotypes, cliched metaphors, sexist commentary, baseless pomp, and comically bad dialogue. Who tells a person that 'you're my fate...drop dead gorgeous'? Anyone in their right mind would have maniacally cackled in his face rather than let him ejaculate all over them. She's Hera, for fucksake. HERA. She knows some things.
An idle pass of its admittedly lovely introduction will trick you into buying this stinking pile of highfalutin garbage, and then it will start to fall apart on you piece by piece, giving you something that requires a round of antibiotics in the process. The analogy that is this book is almost as terrible as the ones I've been attempting in this review so far. I blame that on the book, by the way. You will want to like it so much, but it just will not love you back no matter how many Herculean gestures you attempt in order to woo it. At first you will feel annoyed by some of its small habits, such as saying things like 'Consciousness' and 'Universe' and 'Nothing' and 'Everything' and 'Existence' and 'Soul' with this feigned shaman-like brevity in order to gloss over giant topics about life while still thinking it sounds smarter than you, and is really schooling you at 'Everything' about 'Existence' in the 'Universe' where you are 'Nothing'. Then it will suddenly reveal its whole self to you, and it will be ugly, intellectually insulting stuff. Boy, I sure hope the Ancient Greeks didn't envision their heaven as a dorm room full of morons stoned out of their minds, but what do I know about it?
I really should be packing up right now, considering I'm relocating tomorrow morning. I just had to get this out, man. On the bright side, I have one less thing to cram into the back of my car. I know, I know: sex joke.
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