As you can see, I skipped number eight, which was Shakespeare's Henry IV. While not my favorite of his plays, I recognize the genius to say I liked it well enough. But since I discussed it ad nauseum with my students, I'm done with it - and thus moving on to number 9......Karen Essex's Stealing Athena. I had high hopes for this book since it features one of history's most interesting ladies - the indomitable Mary Nisbit, Countess of Elgin - but unfortunately I had a hard time getting into it. The novel actually centers on the Parthenon and weaves together two tales - that of Aspasia, Perikles' lover, who was alive when the Parthenon was built and may have posed for the its Athena statue, and that of Lady Elgin, who funded her husband's removal of the sculptures when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The text shifts back and forth between the two tales and what they have in common, besides the building itself, is both women have these spirited, overcome-it-all personalities.
I think the problem was that while the two female protagonists were strong, the secondary characters (i.e. everyone else) were pretty flimsy. In Aspasia's story - which constituted most of the second half of the book - it didn't matter all that much because it was really about her...navigating her tenuous relationship with Perikles, achieving success as a philosopher, and later defending herself in court against the establishment who felt she'd overstepped her bounds. But Mary's tale is different because it has everything to do with her husband - and he was such a thinly painted ass in Stealing Athena that it was hard to see why she put up with him.
Historically, Mary and Lord Elgin marry in 1799 - they may or may not have been in love, but she was endowed with an enormous fortune and said to be quite charming, while he had a title and was thought to have a great career ahead of him. They immediately head off to his new post in Istanbul/Constantinople and while there, they convince their hosts - who had ruled Greece since the 1400s - to let them take the Parthenon marbles back to England. [The Turks don't care for the wonders of Ancient Greece and had let the Acropolis buildings fall into ruin.] This becomes Elgin's great passion but he doesn't have the money, so Mary's fortune ends up funding the lengthy and complicated endeavor. But then the tides shift, Elgin becomes a political prisoner in France and Mary spends a lot of years on her own, and it eventually leads them to a very scandalous divorce.
It's a fascinating story - much more complicated than my abridged version - but I didn't feel like Stealing Athena did it justice. The history was all there, but it was hard to get sucked into it because Essex relied on action more than emotion. As a result, I had a hard time figuring out for most of the novel whether or not Elgin was supposed to be the good guy or bad guy - was he a noble collector or a thief of both Mary's fortune and the Parthenon? Was he a loving father and husband or a mean and spiteful man without a nose? (Seriously, he loses his nose.) I found it hard to empathize with Mary's plight because I couldn't get a grip on how I was supposed to feel about Elgin, since his characterization shifted back and forth. So overall, I found Susan Nagel's Mistress of the Elgin Marbles (which Essex mentioned in the acknowledgements) to be much more captivating.
So as you can probably tell, I am a wee bit obsessed with the Elgin Marbles and so the next post is a photo gallery...
No comments:
Post a Comment