Editor’s Note: In a bizarre confluence, all of our regular weekend writers are unable to write their regular columns this week — I don’t think that has ever happened before. Maria Padhila should be back in the saddle with a polyamory/relationship article next weekend; for now, we offer you Carol Van Strum’s latest (awesome) book review. — Amanda
By Carol Van Strum
We need the books that affect us like a disaster … . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka, 1904
Compared to even the frailest old parchments and papyrus or crumbling stone tablets, our high-tech reading devices seem appallingly ephemeral. What are the chances of digital literature being readable after two thousand years of weather and electromagnetic radiation? Of course some of them are unreadable even now, thanks to metastasizing illiteracy, and the best are quickly out of print.
To counter that trend, be boldly subversive: buy books, the real thing, new or used. Smell them, caress them, READ them, quote them, give them as gifts, donate them to libraries, keep them alive. Here are some you may never see on best seller lists or TV trailers. These are books that undermine our most persistent beliefs and certainties, and are above all great fun to read.
Everyone knows Medea killed her children. But how do we know?
The same way we know that Richard III murdered his nephews. We know it because the best playwright of the age chose to tell us. Shakespeare got his plot from Holinshed, and followed the orthodox Tudor line about the House of York, which was almost certainly innocent of those murders. Euripedes took his from Eumoleus and improved it, and according to various sources was paid five talents to make the sorceress Medea into a child murderer.
Drawn from a wealth of scholarly sources, Kerry Greenwood’s Medea: A Delphic Woman Novel (Poisoned Pen Press, 2013) stands all our certainty about her on its head. Young Princess Medea of Colchis, virgin priestess of Hekate, well versed in spells and herbal potions for healing, birth and death, enjoys a life of devotion to the Dark Goddess, untouched by any man — until young Jason makes landfall in the good ship Argo. Medea’s abrupt sexual awakening is as delightful and vividly erotic as our wildest fantasies, coupled as it is with subversive defiance of her father, the king.