Pat Barker | The Women of Troy | Edinburgh International Book Festival
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- Ever since winning the Booker Prize in 1995 for the third book in her Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker has demonstrated an uncanny ability to describe the psychology of individuals during times of conflict. In 2019 Barker published 'The Silence of the Girls', beginning her retelling of the great classical myth, 'The Iliad'.
Join Barker for the launch of the sequel, 'The Women of Troy', in a conversation with journalist Lee Randall. As the action begins, Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors, loaded with their spoils. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind does not come. So the victors remain in limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed.
In these empty, restless days, the hierarchies that held them together begin to fray, old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester. Amidst her squabbling captors, Briseis - now married to Alcimus, but carrying the child of the late Achilles - must forge alliances where she can.
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I loved both books and wished there was a longer interview like this exclusively for SOTG. I can't wait for the third book, mainly to find out if Briseis does love her child and to see Agamemmnon die
Really great encounter of the literary genius here on U.......
In 1979 -1978, I was in Sheffield university, Glasses department. There was a girl hold the name Parker and her face is similar to yours, Are not you?
11.58 'It leaves a bad taste actually. 10 years of fighting heroism, and in the end what actually wins is trickery. It's a very dirty trick' - has Pat Barker not heard the phrase 'All's fair in love and war'?
17.15 '[Pyrrhus] is the only son of Achilles, which is amazing, given the number of sex slaves'
22.45 19 year old Briseis knows how to survive in the Greek camp 'When Troy falls there's an influx of very young girls because Pyrrhus chooses who he wants from the captive women and of course he's 16 years old, he chooses girls of his own age or slightly younger, very young girls, very shocked because of the things they've witnessed, and Briseis sets out to help them', as she has been through the same experiences.
'When you are in exile, all the songs of your homeland are sad'
So far as Pat Barker has to imagine what happened, when the Ancient original literature does not go into details, and uses examples of what happened in more modern war zones as a guide, my guess is that sometimes this will be right, sometimes make things seem worse than they would really have been, and sometimes better.
One argument that slaves might sometimes have been treated better than we might expect is that, say, a thuggish army raping and looting their way through the Eastern Congo today have little incentive, from a selfish point of view, to care much what happens to their victims after they have finished using them. In the Ancient World, they often did, as although a slave had no rights, they did have a value as property. It was not usually in the owners interest to treat their slave, any more than their horse, so badly that they died, or were left so badly injured in body or mind that they could no longer give useful service.
On the other hand, the Greeks of Homer's time were probably at about the same level of development as the early Medieval Vikings, they still occaisionally practiced human sacrifice, as well as predatory raids on more peaceful and prosperous civilisations, slavery and infanticide.
29.59 'There are children born of rape, whom the mother simply cannot love'.
Sad, but there must have been quite a few of those after the Greeks conquered Troy.