#ferdia lennon

[hoeratius]

Any clutuals reading Glorious Exploits? Glorious Exploits for a clutual?

[oleworm]

Review to “Glorious Exploits” by Ferdia Lennon

Thucydides for size.

This has to be the best book that I’ve read in several years, or the one who scratches the greatest number of itches among various interests. It begins as a comedy of war, drawing on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and Plutarch’s accounts of Athenian prisoners of war who survived the aftermath of the failed Sicilian expedition by reciting lines from Euripides but also—in more recent memory—recreates the emotional weight of episodes described by survivors of 20th century wars. The darkness is viewed, at the start, obliquely, but if the reader does not see it, it is because they choose not to, because it is always present.

As time passes, and the Athenians in the quarry continue to starve, the option will be taken away from them. It is a lot of fun, and I think a certain kind of reader needs to be tricked this way into acknowledging certain realities. You laugh along with one character, an unemployed potter helping his friend to stage a play, while another, right next to him, is experiencing the horrors of starvation—and two minutes ago he witnessed his loved one clubbed to death by a man who lost his son to the invading army. They are experiencing, in simultaneous, two completely different stories. The reader holds these contradictions within themselves for a great part of the story.

Another episode, from close to beginning of the book, as not to spoil the tale: a drunken evening at the pub, described with great accuracy to those settings where such things as pubs exist. An insecure man negs a woman who happens to be a slave, captured in war.

It is effective at what it does, and I commend the author for finishing it, for not giving up—I listened to an interview with him where he said that it took him seven years, on and off. It was worth it not only for the recognition he received for his efforts but because it is a contribution to the human culture. More and more we need to find ways for people to face certain topics that they would shelter themselves from, now when they are most important, even something as basic as recognising the humanity of others. It is a well-researched story set in Classical Greece, but it could not be successful if it weren’t also actual. I have seen some criticisms about how you cannot joke about some of the topics covered in the book, but perhaps it is not for those people, who already understand what they refer to. They can move on to more serious matters, but there are others who understand only through jokes, through lightness, or they feel threatened and cease to pay attention.

I’ll not ruin the ending, but it was the piece that completed the puzzle, in more than one way. I laughed, I cried, I cared a lot. And it made me want to reread The History of the Peloponnesian War.

[kammartinez]

Ferdia Lennon on the Usefulness of Being Lost

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they hav

[greekbros]

(strangely enough, here's a book recommendation!)

(the basic synopsis is about two friends who would like to make a production of Madea and an amphitheater full of war prisoners from Athens.)

(this is a bit of a dark comedy with a lot of historical realism and I can honestly say probably one of the best examples of average life in ancient greece at least from the perspectives of two unemployed men. It's original yet with a bit of familiar trope of a buddy movie but with real-life limitations of war and poverty that elevate the story's character driven narrative.)

(so far I've stopped at least a chapter 5 and I can honestly say it's been very refreshing to see something both easy to pick up with a lot of complexity in terms of motivation and character perspective.)

(it's an easy read with a good bite to it, it's so far better than a retelling of a mythology.)

(8/10)

[lonelymoonsthings]

Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon

“It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected, and hanging on by the slimmest of threads. Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. When they take to visiting the nearby quarry, they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives. And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.

But as the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. As the performance draws near, the men will find their courage tested in ways they could never have imagined…”

Paperback

276 pages

Irish-Libyan literature

Published 18 January 2024

[embracing-the-shortness]

[sunshine-daydreams0809]

reading glorious exploits by ferdia lennon, and the whole emphasis on euripides out of the three (sophocles and aeschylus) isn't lost on me 🎀

nah but one chapter in, and i find this so interesting! i've been in a very bad rut with both my reading and writing, this book might just get me out of it.

[rhetoricandlogic]

A Comic Riff on Greek Tragedy, With an Irish Accent

By Annalisa Quinn

Published March 26, 2024 Updated April 10, 2024

There is a small, moving detail in Plutarch’s account of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse during the final stages of the Peloponnesian War.

In 412 BC, the Athenian forces, then the dominant power in the Aegean, overplayed their hand. Routed in a brutal sea battle, rounded up as prisoners into the quarries of Syracuse and given starvation rations, some Athenians survived, Plutarch writes, because the Syracusans so loved the tragedies of Euripides that they offered food or freedom in exchange for verses. It would be like if the Viet Cong released American P.O.W.s for singing Elvis.

“They say that many Athenians who reached home in safety greeted Euripides with affectionate hearts,” Plutarch wrote, and told him “that they had been set free from slavery for rehearsing what they remembered of his works.”

This is the seed of Ferdia Lennon’s breezy, winning debut, “Glorious Exploits,” set in ancient Syracuse but written in the language of contemporary Ireland, where Lennon was raised. There has been a pleasing recent turn away from making ancient people in fiction speak in the style of Victorian poets — handmaidens, smiting, woe, bosoms, etc. — including Emily Wilson’s sublimely wry, unpretentious Homer translations and Pat Barker’s (less successful) feminist retellings of Athenian tragedy.

Lennon’s vernacular gives the novel a shambolic charm, a story told in a Dublin bar by a drunk lurching between poetry and obscenity — your best friend tonight even if he might not remember you tomorrow.

Lampo, the narrator, is an illiterate, unemployed potter with a love of wine. He begins the story on a sunny morning, going to the quarry with his friend Gelon to “feed the Athenians,” the way someone might idly feed ducks.

They smell the captives before seeing them. “Ah, and I like the way they smell,” thinks Lampo. “It’s awful, but it’s wonderful awful. They smell like victory and more. Every Syracusan feels it when they get that smell. Even the slaves feel it. Rich or poor, free or not, you get a whiff of those pits, and your life seems somehow richer than it did before, your blankets warmer, your food tastier.”

The Athenians also serve another purpose. “A mouthful of olives for some ‘Medea,’” Gelon shouts, as the starving captives crowd around, trying to remember lines. Eventually, the two plot to put on a full production of “Medea” — with chorus, masks and more — along with Euripides’ newest tragedy, “The Trojan Women,” never before seen in Sicily.

The middle of the novel is essentially a buddy comedy: They secure the backing of a mysterious funder, Lampo spends their money on booze and clothes, they pick up ruffians eager to help and they grow somewhat fond of the Athenians (Lampo periodically ruffles their hair, which floats away in the breeze from malnutrition).

This is all fun — I first read the novel in one happy sitting, on a plane — but Lennon attempts to go deeper, with mixed success. One sign of ambition is his choice of play: Euripides probably wrote some 90 in his lifetime, and Plutarch doesn’t specify which the captives sang for freedom.

“Medea,” one of his most famous, is an obvious choice. But “Trojan Women” — about Hecuba, Cassandra, and the women left after the sacking of Troy as they wait to be taken into slavery — is something else. Instead of the typical tragic arc from power to ruin, it begins and ends in misery. The classicist Gilbert Murray described it like this: “The only movement of the drama is a gradual extinguishing of all the familiar lights of human life.”

“Trojan Women" was likely at least partly inspired by the Athenian army’s slaughter of the entire adult male population of Melos the year before it premiered. The men were butchered, the women and children sold, in a tactic summarized by Thucydides as “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

This setup — conquerors made captive, then made to play versions of their own victims before an audience of their recent conquerors — promises an interesting experiment about reversal, sympathy, and power. But instead, the novel seems to assert rather than show or interrogate its central idea, a vague one about the power of storytelling — a phrase that makes me feel like a dutiful A.P. English student or the kind of person who owns an “I <3 BOOKS” mug.

In “The Iliad,” Hecuba says that she wants to cannibalize her son’s killer, to “eat his liver” like a carrion bird on the battlefields of Troy. In “Medea,” the queen’s rage at her unfaithful husband is so great that she slaughters her own children. These are stories about deep, excruciating ties of love and friendship and family, severed again and again by war and death.

There’s nothing approximating that depth of feeling in Lennon’s novel. Relationships feel like those between drinking buddies: affectionate and fun, but bloodless.