NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. He teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.Ĭopyright © 2005 NPR. NORRIS: The book is 'The Penelopiad' by Margaret Atwood. Or as Atwood's Penelope would have it, woven and undone, woven and undone, and woven again. If finally this version of Penelope's life doesn't fully shift our own understanding of Odysseus' return, it does make for a fascinating and really attractive version of this old, old story, a creation tale about the founding of our civilization meant to be heard over and over and over. The maids sing in counterpoint to Penelope's matter-of-fact voice and lend a hallucinatory strain to a tale already as fantastic as any in the Western tradition.Īlong with her presentation of the hallucinatory maids and Penelope's straight talk about her husband, her girlie laments about the ferocious competition of her cousin Helen and her queenly worries about fending off the suitors, Atwood's brilliance emerges in the skillful way she's woven her own research on the anthropological underpinnings of Home's epic into the patterns of her own stylized version of the poem.

First of all, she frames the story with a chorus made up of those maids of Penelope who, as Homer portrays it, consorted with the suitors while Odysseus was still making his way back home. Atwood conducts herself quite cleverly in making her portrait. The mortal woman for whom Odysseus spurned offers of immortality and eternal nights of lovemaking with goddesses and witches so that he might return to the one woman he truly desired. Not until this sacred work was finished could I even think of choosing a new husband.' Faithful Penelope. `I set up a large piece of weaving on my loom and said it was a shroud for my father-in-law Laertes since it would be impious of me not to provide a costly winding sheet for him in the event that he should die. `Here is what I did,' Atwood's Penelope tell us. Her new book is called 'The Penelopiad.' Reviewer Alan Cheuse says it's a refreshing retelling of Homer's 'Odyssey' from the point of view of the warrior hero's wife.

Margaret Atwood is one of the most admired novelists in North America.

The penelopiad by margaret atwood