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Aug. 17th, 2024 08:27 amOne plot I will read without fail every time I come across it is 'probably-doomed people in a desperate situation nonetheless put on a theatrical.' I said this on several other sites as a one-liner and immediately got accurately and pleasingly recced Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits, which is of course the very book that inspired the post.
Glorious Exploits is set after the failed Athenian invasion of Syracuse -- some time after, when the Athenian prisoners imprisoned in the local quarry are just about on their last legs of starvation and desperation. The book opens when Gelon, a Syracusian enthusiast of Athenian theater who's gone a bit weird with trauma and grief (as indeed everyone on both sides of the war has gone a bit weird with trauma and grief), decides to offer extra food to anyone who can recite a few lines of Medea. Then he goes one step further: what if they put on a performance of Medea, right there in the quarry? Actually, they should do both Medea AND Euripides' new weird experimental play, The Trojan Women. After all, the Peloponnesian War is raging, and Sparta could defeat and raze Athens any day now; this might be their only chance to see it.
Gelon is the driving force for the first part of the book, but he's not our boy. Our boy is Lampo, a shitty little guy with a bad leg, bad impulse control, a bad habit of verbally lashing out when he feels low to try to make other people feel lower, and another habit of taking strong, impulsive fancies to people. One of those people is Gelon; they've been ride or die since they were kids, which is how Lampo ends up co-director of this bizarre prison theater project. Another is Paches, an Athenian that Lampo casts as Jason and Helen in the plays, and a third is Lyra, a Libyan slave at his favorite bar.
Let's be clear: the power dynamics in these latter two relationships are explicitly and absolutely fucked; the play, as it comes together is beautiful, but cursed. I've seen various reviews describe this book as a comedy because Lampo is a funny little guy who talks like Someone You Might Meet Down The Pub, and certainly it is often funny, on a prose level. Also it's also about the transformative power of art and how it can force us to recognize the humanity in each other. But it's also About Tragedy; it's about the collective trauma of war and a handful of prisoners desperately reciting Euripides for their life and extra rations while their fellow prisoners starve to death around them, and the book does not for a moment forget this, even as it gradually pushes our shitty little protagonist into an increasingly less shitty shape, towards acts of unexpected transcendence. Good book!!!
Glorious Exploits is set after the failed Athenian invasion of Syracuse -- some time after, when the Athenian prisoners imprisoned in the local quarry are just about on their last legs of starvation and desperation. The book opens when Gelon, a Syracusian enthusiast of Athenian theater who's gone a bit weird with trauma and grief (as indeed everyone on both sides of the war has gone a bit weird with trauma and grief), decides to offer extra food to anyone who can recite a few lines of Medea. Then he goes one step further: what if they put on a performance of Medea, right there in the quarry? Actually, they should do both Medea AND Euripides' new weird experimental play, The Trojan Women. After all, the Peloponnesian War is raging, and Sparta could defeat and raze Athens any day now; this might be their only chance to see it.
Gelon is the driving force for the first part of the book, but he's not our boy. Our boy is Lampo, a shitty little guy with a bad leg, bad impulse control, a bad habit of verbally lashing out when he feels low to try to make other people feel lower, and another habit of taking strong, impulsive fancies to people. One of those people is Gelon; they've been ride or die since they were kids, which is how Lampo ends up co-director of this bizarre prison theater project. Another is Paches, an Athenian that Lampo casts as Jason and Helen in the plays, and a third is Lyra, a Libyan slave at his favorite bar.
Let's be clear: the power dynamics in these latter two relationships are explicitly and absolutely fucked; the play, as it comes together is beautiful, but cursed. I've seen various reviews describe this book as a comedy because Lampo is a funny little guy who talks like Someone You Might Meet Down The Pub, and certainly it is often funny, on a prose level. Also it's also about the transformative power of art and how it can force us to recognize the humanity in each other. But it's also About Tragedy; it's about the collective trauma of war and a handful of prisoners desperately reciting Euripides for their life and extra rations while their fellow prisoners starve to death around them, and the book does not for a moment forget this, even as it gradually pushes our shitty little protagonist into an increasingly less shitty shape, towards acts of unexpected transcendence. Good book!!!
