Reviews for Singing the past

The average rating for Singing the past based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-08-16 00:00:00 Patrick Morris This book was recommended to me by my late professor Nick Howe, and was probably my first major exposure to comparative study of oral culture. It's been a while, so my memory isn't that sharp at the moment, but in general it is a parallel discussion of the oral epic in Kazakhstan (I think-- could have been over a broader area) and the question of orality in Medieval literature, as well as the question of the existence of epic in Medieval Europe. Much of his speculation involves the role of genre and repetoire in the Medieval material, taking his lead from similar issues in the Turkic material.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-01 00:00:00 Rubber Burner Oh man. I had quite a bad reading experience with this book, though in all fairness, that might be much more to do with the weird mental block I've had this month, coupled with my insistence to not juggle more than two books at a time and the Star Wars rabbit-hole down which my brain has fallen, courtesy of Rogue One. The very ambitious scope of this book didn't help my quite distracted reading, which I grabbed in moments over the last month, and as a result I couldn't really get a handle on the narrative or the sprawling family trees, particularly paired with a lot historical and cultural references, not all of which I was familiar with. There were some stunning turns of phrase and images though - the surface of a pond resembling mint sauce, or a wheelchair as an ampersand. Will definitely re-read in future, when my head's a bit less jumbled.