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Loading... The Silence of the Girls (2018)by Pat Barker
  
» 8 more Books Read in 2019 (410) Five star books (364) Books Read in 2018 (2,597) Western Europe (81) The Trojan War (13)
Hypnotic, poetic, brutal, tender... deserving of all the praise. I'd given this a wide berth as I didn't think I was interested enough in the ancient world, but I'm glad I was nudged to give this a go. My first Pat Barker, too - so there's plenty more to explore. (  ) alexrichman | Jun 8, 2021 |  Trojan women  18cran | Apr 25, 2021 | I didn't now the story of the battle of Troy, and it showed the brutality I'd imagined in Greek writings as the society was so male dominated. Telling the story from a woman's viewpoint was good. Overall it didn't really grab me. (  ) SteveMcI | Apr 4, 2021 | the trojan war, from the trojan women's point of view. this was, at points, a harrowing read. but it was so well written that it kept me reading. i also noted that the book being told from a woman's point of view, she actually did not have that many dialogue. (  ) riida | Mar 5, 2021 | A fictionalization of a mythological story, the story behind the Trojan war. This time, though, it is told from the point of view of the women, specifically one woman who has to watch Achilles kill her husband and her brothers, and then becomes his slave, required to spend her nights in his bed. It is a different angle, but one that is not strange to those of us who often think about the women that just sort of get a mention in the stories. The details are well drawn out, in depth, and you can almost feel the dirty, hot camp where the Greeks have spent the past nine years. The men in the story are more realistic than the classic hero story, ranging from buffoons to highly skilled soldiers, monsters to men with the spark of human kindness who can inspire real devotion. The women are less drawn out, but this appears to be a feature; the feeling of them being subsumed into this faceless mass of slaves that the men use as they wish and discard is brought into sharper relief by the presence of only a few women that are "in color", so to speak. ( ) Devil_llama | Jan 11, 2021 | no reviews | add a review
"From the Booker Prize-winning author of the Regeneration trilogy comes a monumental new masterpiece, set in the midst of literature's most famous war. Pat Barker turns her attention to the timeless legend of The Iliad, as experienced by the captured women living in the Greek camp in the final weeks of the Trojan War. The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, who continue to wage bloody war over a stolen woman--Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman watches and waits for the war's outcome: Briseis. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles's concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life, as one of the many conquered women who serve the Greek army. When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and cooly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position to observe the two men driving the Greek forces in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate, not only of Briseis's people, but also of the ancient world at large. Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war--the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead--all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives--and it is nothing short of magnificent"--"The Iliad, as experienced by the captured women living in the Greek camp in the final weeks of the Trojan War"-- No library descriptions found. |
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