Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Having written tales set in ancient Greece myself, I know how difficult it is to strike the proper feel, rhythm and tone of voice to attempt to re-create a world that is, on the one hand, vanished and, on the other, totally present and inhering in our modern, Western sphere. If you get too "ancient," you lose the reader. Go too contemporary and the piece feels fake. Eugene Kraay hits exactly the right note with this tale of Theagenes, the great Olympic boxer, as told by Simonides, the poet who wrote the famous epitaph for the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. Theagenes is a tremendous character. Superhuman, larger than life, but deeply flawed, self-tormented, driven, even consumed, by inner imperatives of honor and redemption. This is very Greek (and very American) and "The Olympian" makes you feel it in your bones. It's a quest story. Theagenes starts out seeking one form of redemption, a bout with the great Spartan champion Lampis, and in the end finds another form that is unexpected, far deeper and rings absolutely true. I confess I was skeptical picking this book up because a friend had told me what its ambitions were. But it hooked me from the first page. I know Greece, the land and the sea, and "The Olympian" gets that right too. I felt as if I were reading an actual manuscript from those days that had somehow just been dug up from an archaeological dig. Eugene Kraay is a born storyteller. His tale zigs and zags and never loses a jot of momentum. He gets you "on the road" with his characters and you feel you're right there with them. The scenes at Olympia are tremendous sportswriting, if such a phrase can be applied. By the time the story reaches Thermopylae, to which Theagenes and Simonides have trekked because Lampis has gone there with his fellow Spartans to help defend the pass against Xerxes and the invading Persian multitudes, you are living every second with them. I won't spoil the ending. Suffice it to say, no one has ever hit Thermopylae from this angle and it is powerful, effecting and unforgettable. One final thought. There are many writers who can write a great sentence or a great paragraph or a great chapter, but very few can conceive a story from start to finish, make it unique, and have it hang together all the way through, so that when you've reached the climax, you can look back as a reader at everything that came before and see how nothing was superfluous and everything has borne you skillfully to the pleasure of the finish. Eugene Kraay does that with absolute ease and assurance in this, his first book. I can't wait to see what he'll do next!
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Olympian: A Tale of Ancient Hellas
In the 75th Olympiad by Greek reckoning, the strongest, fastest, quickest and most agile men in Hellas gathered at Olympia to celebrate life through athletic competition.That same year, 480 BCE by our reckoning, the Persian Emprie ruled the known world save for that small peninsula dominated by a dozen democratic city-states.To avenge the defeat of his father on the plain of Marathon 10 years earlier, Xerxes, the Great King amassed an army a million men strong to bring these free states to heel.Amid the cheering crowds, the sweat, dust and blood on the Elisian fields of friendly strife, and threatened by the impending clash of armies with the fate of Western Civilization in the balance, two men, one a boxer, the other a poet, come to the revelation that the true worth of a man is based on more than what he does for himself.The Olympian explores a little known reason why only 300 Spartans faced a million men in the Thermopylae Pass, and stands as tribute to those extraordinary warriors who waged a battle that saved Western culture.
Click here for more information about The Olympian: A Tale of Ancient Hellas
0 comments:
Post a Comment