'The Odyssey' (2017) by Emily Wilson
I don’t want to hector Homer, but somehow this was both boring and evil, childish and didactic. I won’t belabour the book’s immorality, since it’s so obvious; it’s the near-total absence of artistic merit that is not obvious. I found nothing in it worth reading or quoting until Book 9, nearly halfway through. These are songs of praise of warmongering pirates. (People love pirates, and I say let em. Just don’t call them paragons.) The ideology is dad porn, a set of thin, obvious, animal values. “Kings do whatever they want - death for messing with a noble; don’t cross the priests; offer huge sacrifices; always do what your husband and dad say; the unlucky and the disabled are cursed and to be shunned; blood is blood is blood.” (It’s not as if they could easily have been otherwise. Too poor, too lawless and misruled, too near to nature.) (Odysseus sleeps with half a dozen other women and demigods, most of them begging him to, and needless to say suffers nothing of it.) There’s no mention