It retells the Greek myths from the point of view of the sorceress Circe, she of turning-men-into-pigs fame, drawing in particular from The Metamorphoses and The Trojan Cycle. Circe is a complex heroine who struggles. It is set in the Bronze Age where gods, heroes, and monsters populate the world and where women, even immortal ones, are often powerless. What had Aeëtes called an ugly nymph? A stain upon the face of the world. Circe is a 2017 novel by Madeline Miller. Circe is Madeline Miller’s 2018 adaptation of the Greek legend of Circe, the witch whom Odysseus encounters in The Odyssey on his journey home from the Trojan War. I looked down at my body and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father’s fire And those were only the things that had left marks. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives. I might have told him, in those hours, stories of my own His face would be intent as he listened, his relentless mind examining, weighing and cataloguing He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. Whoever saw him must salute and say: There is a man who has seen the world. Enduring Odysseus, he was, and the name was stitched into his skin. It tells the story of the daughter of the sun god Helios and a beautiful nymph, Perse. The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. Circe is a 2018 novel by American novelist and classicist Madeline Miller.
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