book review of circe

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The original nasty woman is a goddess for our times

The archaeological evidence is sketchy, but the first pussy hat was probably knitted by Circe. Among nasty women, the witch of Aeaea has held a place of prominence since Homer first sang of her wiles. For most of us, that was a long time ago — 700 B.C. or freshman English — but popular interest in “The Odyssey” picked up last fall when Emily Wilson published the first English translation by a woman. Wilson, a classicist at the University of Pennsylvania, described Circe as “the goddess who speaks in human tongues” and reminded us that what makes this enchantress particularly dangerous is that she is as beautiful as she is powerful.

That combination of qualities has excited male desire and dread at least since Athena sprang from the head of Zeus. On papyrus or Twitter , from Olympus to Hollywood , we have a roster of handy slurs and strategies to keep women caught between Scylla and Charybdis: either frigid or slutty, unnaturally masculine or preternaturally sexless, Lady Macbeth or Mother Mary.

Now, into that ancient battle — reinvigorated in our own era by the #MeToo movement — comes an absorbing new novel by Madeline Miller called “ Circe .” In his 1726 translation of “The Odyssey,” Alexander Pope claimed that Circe possessed an “adamantine heart,” but Miller finds the goddess’s affections wounded, complicated and capable of extraordinary sympathy. And to anyone who thinks that women can be shamed into silence, this witch has just one thing to say: “That’ll do, pig.”

Miller is something of a literary sorceress herself. As a 39-year-old Latin teacher, she created an international sensation in 2011 with her debut novel, a stirring reimagining of “The Iliad” called “The Song of Achilles.” It’s a pleasure to see that same transformative power directed at Circe, the woman who waylaid Odysseus and his men as they sailed home to Ithaca.

The first English translation of ‘The Odyssey’ by a woman was worth the wait

“When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist,” Circe begins at the start of a story that will carry us across millennia. Although she writes in prose, Miller hews to the poetic timber of the epic, with a rich, imaginative style commensurate to the realm of immortal beings sparked with mortal sass. Circe’s father, Helios, lives in a palace of “polished obsidian . . . the stone floors smoothed by centuries of divine feet.” She describes a royal court just beyond the edge of physical possibility: “The whole world was made of gold. The light came from everywhere at once, his yellow skin, his lambent eyes, the bronze flashing of his hair. His flesh was hot as a brazier, and I pressed as close as he would let me, like a lizard to noonday rocks.”

In this fully re-created childhood, Miller finds the roots of Circe’s later personality and isolation. Mocked by her far more majestic family, Circe is a kind of Titanic Jane Eyre, sensitive and miserable, but nursing an iron will. (She also develops an acerbic sense of humor: Her father, she tells us, is “a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.”) Although her relatives disparage her, Circe cultivates the occult arts that will one day shock them. “I had begun to know what fear was,” she tells us. “What could make a god afraid? I knew that answer too. A power greater than their own.”

‘The Song of Achilles,’ by Madeline Miller

While working within the constraints of the “The Odyssey” and other ancient myths, Miller finds plenty of room to weave her own surprising story of a passionate young woman banished to lavish solitude. “To be utterly alone,” Circe scoffs. “What worse punishment could there be, my family thought, than to be deprived of their divine presence?” But her bravado is short-lived. “The still air crawled across my skin and shadows reached out their hands. I stared into the darkness, straining to hear past the beat of my own blood.” In that extremity, Circe discovers the labor and, eventually, the power of witchcraft.

A protagonist, even a fascinating one, stuck alone in the middle of nowhere poses special narrative challenges, but Miller keeps her novel filled with perils and romance. She’s just as successful recounting far-off adventures — such as the horror of the Minotaur — as she is reenacting adventures on the island. In the novel’s most unnerving encounter, young Medea stops by mid-honeymoon fresh from chopping up her brother. Chastened by bitter experience, Circe offers her niece wise counsel, but you know how well that turns out.

Which is one of the most amazing qualities of this novel: We know how everything here turns out — we’ve known it for thousands of years — and yet in Miller’s lush reimagining, the story feels harrowing and unexpected. The feminist light she shines on these events never distorts their original shape; it only illuminates details we hadn’t noticed before.

That theme develops long before Odysseus and his men arrive, as the novel explores the prevalence and presumption of rape. Again and again, sailors land upon Circe’s shore and violate her hospitality so grotesquely that she’s forced to develop her infamous potions and spells. “The truth is,” she says ruefully, “men make terrible pigs.” Considering the treatment she has received, we can’t blame her for concluding, “There were no pious men anymore, there had not been for a long time.”

Of course, her grim appraisal is a perfect introduction for Odysseus. He doesn’t arrive on Aeaea until more than halfway through the novel, but then Miller plays their verbal sparring with a delightful mix of wit and lust. The affection that eventually develops between them is intriguingly complex and mature — such a smart revision of the misogynist fantasy passed down from antiquity:

“Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting,” Circe tells us. “I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”

There will be plenty of weeping later in this novel, although it’s likely to be your own. In the story that dawns from Miller’s rosy fingers, the fate that awaits Circe is at once divine and mortal, impossibly strange and yet entirely human.

Ron Charles is the editor of Book World and host of TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

On April 18 at 7 p.m., Madeline Miller will be at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. politics-prose.com .

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Why the literature of antiquity still matters, by Michael Dirda

By Madeline Miller

Little, Brown. 393 pp. $27

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2018

New York Times Bestseller

by Madeline Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.

“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.

Pub Date: April 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

LITERARY FICTION

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

IndieBound Bestseller

NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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Circe, a Vilified Witch From Classical Mythology, Gets Her Own Epic

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By Alexandra Alter

• April 6, 2018

On a cold, sunny afternoon in March, the novelist Madeline Miller wandered through the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, swooning over ancient amphoras and ethereal statues of gods and goddesses.

She was eager to see a particular artifact — a 2,500-year-old wine vessel painted with a scene from Homer’s Odyssey, as Odysseus confronts the goddess and sorceress Circe after she transforms his men into pigs.

Ms. Miller was riveted and horrified by that scene when she first read the Odyssey, and it became a pivotal moment in her new novel, “Circe,” a bold and subversive retelling of the goddess’s story that manages to be both epic and intimate in its scope, recasting the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey as a hero in her own right.

But on her way to see the vase, she kept getting distracted, dazzled by the mythical figures that have populated her imagination since she was a little girl, when her mother read passages to her from the Iliad and Odyssey at bedtime. More age-appropriate fare never grabbed her attention in the same way. “I wanted gods and monsters,” she said.

Visiting the museum felt like a homecoming of sorts. Growing up on the Upper East Side, she spent hours roaming the Met, marveling at the heroes, warriors and deities. Exploring those halls decades later, she was just as awe-struck.

“This is one of my favorites,” she said, bounding toward a marble statue of a wounded Amazon warrior, noting that the figure would have once been brightly painted. “You can see the drops of blood on the side of her breast.”

She spotted a terra-cotta plaque of Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, cautiously approaching his wife Penelope after he returns to Ithaca. “I love the emotion that’s conveyed in just her posture,” she said.

Tucked away in a dimly lit gallery was the Circe vase, which showed Odysseus pursuing Circe with his sword drawn as his pigheaded men trail helplessly behind him.

“Circe as a character is the embodiment of male anxiety about female power,” Ms. Miller said, as she studied the vase, snapping photos with her phone. “Of course she has to be vanquished.”

That scene infuriated Ms. Miller when she read the Odyssey on her own, at 13. It bothered her that one of the most powerful female figures in the epic was left kneeling and cowering before Odysseus, and then takes him to bed as a conciliatory gesture. “For the hero to succeed, the woman has to be put in her place, and that was always so disappointing,” she said.

Years later, when she was majoring in classics at Brown University and read the Odyssey in the original Homeric Greek for the first time, Ms. Miller began to rethink Circe’s story, which unfolds from Odysseus’s perspective, as he describes his time on her island to the Phaeacians. She saw that Circe, far from being purely a villain or a vanquished witch, had a benevolent side and played a crucial role guiding Odysseus back to Ithaca.

Ms. Miller’s fascination with Circe became an obsession after she published her 2011 debut novel, “The Song of Achilles,” a retelling of the Iliad that centers on a romance between Achilles and his friend Patroclus.

She had planned to stay away from epics for a while, but kept thinking about the witch, alone on her island. Why did she transform men into animals? What happened to her after Odysseus and his crew sailed away, or in the centuries before they arrived? She decided Circe deserved her own epic.

“Epic has been so traditionally male,” she said. “All these stories are composed by men, largely starring men, and I really wanted a female perspective.”

Recycling classical myths is a well-worn literary trope; everyone from Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood and Rick Riordan have riffed on and remixed Greek and Roman stories. Ms. Miller, 39, who lives outside Philadelphia, is particularly well equipped to tackle Homer. She began studying Latin when she was 12, started on Greek a couple of years later, and seems to have near encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Western gods and goddesses.

“Circe” — a feminist reboot starring a goddess who has often been overlooked, or miscast as a vindictive seductress — has drawn praise both from classics scholars and novelists like Margaret George and Ann Patchett.

Emily Wilson, a classicist who recently published a new translation of the Odyssey, said she was skeptical at first of yet another “retelling of a classical myth,” but was won over by Ms. Miller’s take. “What she’s doing is partly about gender, but it’s also addressing a bigger question about power, and the abuse of power,” she said.

In Ms. Miller’s version, Circe’s encounter with Odysseus is only a slice of her story, which unfolds over thousands of years and begins in the palace of her father, the sun god Helios. Her family members, who treat her with cruelty or indifference, become infamous in their own right: Her sister Pasiphae marries King Minos and gives birth to the Minotaur, a bullheaded, man-eating monster; while her brother Aeetes grows up to rule Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, and fathers Medea, who later murders her children.

Circe’s fortune changes when she discovers her power to transform. After she turns a nymph, Scylla, into a six-headed sea monster, Helios banishes Circe to a remote island where she spends centuries in exile, with wolves and lions as her companions.

Ms. Miller was intrigued by Homer’s description of Circe as ”speaking like a human,” an odd detail that is never fully explained in the Odyssey. In her novel, Circe’s deceptively soft voice produces grave consequences. When sailors wash up on her island, she welcomes them with wine and food, and they mistake her for a mortal. After a violent encounter with one sailor, she begins preemptively attacking them, turning them into pigs.

To flesh out Circe’s story, Ms. Miller looked beyond the Odyssey and consulted a handful of ancient texts. She found scattered references to Circe across the ancient world, and drew from the plot of the Telegony, an epic preserved only in a short summary, which tells the story of Telegonus, Odysseus and Circe’s son.

She plucked other details from the Argonautica, an epic poem about the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, which describes how Circe performs a purification ritual for Jason and Medea.

She wove some of the mythology into her narrative, and ignored other depictions that struck her as silly or sexist, deliberately omitting a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Circe punishes a king who spurns her advances by turning him into a woodpecker.

“That’s one of the funny things about mythological realism, or whatever it is that I write,” she said. “You have to write about six-headed monsters, but from a realistic perspective.”

It’s perhaps the same reason Ms. Miller loves the Greek and Roman antiquities at the Met, works of art that feel both timeless and transcendent, yet lifelike. As she made her way through the treasure-filled galleries, she kept “nerding out,” as she sheepishly called it, over the relics. She paused to admire a marble figure of Aphrodite crouching in the bath and a headless statue of Hermes.

A look of excitement crossed her face as she rushed toward one of her favorite artifacts. “If you will indulge me, there’s a chariot,” she said, practically skipping off.

Follow Alexandra Alter on Twitter: @xanalter .

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Circe by Madeline Miller review – Greek classic thrums with contemporary relevance

M adeline Miller’s 2011 retelling of the Iliad , The Song of Achilles , recast the epic as a love story between Achilles and Patroclus, taking us into the emotional heart of some of the most moving and memorable passages in the poem. The book was a surprise hit, winning Miller – then a Latin and Greek teacher – the Orange prizecorrect and a place on the bestseller lists. What she was doing was nothing new – writers have been reimagining Homer’s work since the Aeneid – but the contemporary tone and modern sensibility did something extraordinary to the well-known tale. The best historical fiction balances the past and present in the text, so that it both celebrates and collapses the distance between then and now. In The Song of Achilles , Miller rendered that ancient war thrillingly, grippingly present; her vision of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was one of steaming, timeless sensuality.

Miller begins Circe in the court of Helios: the sun god and her heroine’s father. “His palace was a neighbour to Oceanos’, buried in the earth’s rock, and its walls were made of obsidian.” From the start, we are made aware of Circe’s inferior status – “Circe is dull as a rock,” says her father. She is named after her yellow eyes – circe means hawk – and for the “thin sound” of her crying, which we later learn is because she has been born with the voice of a mortal, not a god. Circe witnesses the punishment of Prometheus and this kindles a deep sympathetic interest in humans. Soon after, she meets Glaucos, a fisherman, and they become lovers. Wishing to keep him from his own mortality, she makes the first use of pharmaka – the magical herbs that activate her sorcery. Glaucos becomes a god, “towering like a sea-surge”, green-haired and trident-wielding. He swiftly grows tired of the unprepossessing Circe and transfers his attentions to Scylla, a beautiful sea-nymph. Circe, enraged, turns her witchcraft upon the nymph, and is exiled to a beautiful, unpeopled island.

It is here, on Aiaia, that Odysseus finds her, happily surrounded by tame wolves and lions and swine – the latter are earlier visitors that she has bewitched after an unwise sea captain attempts to rape her. As with her previous novel, the great skill here is the way Miller gives voice to a previously muted perspective in the classics, forging a great romance from the scraps left to us by the ancients. If The Song of Achilles recovered a half-buried homosexual love story from the Iliad, Circe gives us a feminist slant on the Odyssey . “Humbling women seems to be a chief pastime of poets,” Circe says at one point. “As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.” It’s fitting that Circe is published just a year after the first major female translation of the Odyssey , by Emily Wilson . Wilson said in her introduction to that translation “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about”.

In Miller’s vision Circe, who is passed over in a few dozen lines in the Greek original, matters deeply. Hilary Mantel has spoken repeatedly of the problems that arise when modern ethical mores are placed in the mouths of historical figures. In her Reith Lectures, she says: “This is a persistent difficulty for women writers, who want to write about women in the past, but can’t resist retrospectively empowering them.” Miller flouts Mantel’s interdiction winningly, joyously, and in a way that is powerfully affecting.

The Song of Achilles may have been a bestseller, but its critical reception was decidedly mixed. Fusty – and almost always male – critics lamented the historical inaccuracies, the liberties taken with the text, the cliches. They missed the point that Miller was seeking to popularise stories that were first popular three millennia ago, employing the tools of the novelist to reveal new internal landscapes in these familiar tales. In her Circe , Miller has made a collage out of a variety of source materials – from Ovid to Homer to another lost epic, the Telegony – but the guiding instinct here is to re-present the classics from the perspective of the women involved in them, and to do so in a way that makes these age-old texts thrum with contemporary relevance. If you read this book expecting a masterpiece to rival the originals, you’ll be disappointed; Circe is, instead, a romp, an airy delight, a novel to be gobbled greedily in a single sitting.

• Madeline Miller
• The Observer

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BookBrowse Reviews Circe by Madeline Miller

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by Madeline Miller

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Madeline Miller follows up her prize-winning debut, Song of Achilles , with another dazzling Greek myth retelling that explores femininity and self-determinism through the lesser known figure of Circe the nymph.

Voted 2018 Best Fiction Award Winner by BookBrowse Subscribers Towards the end of Madeline Miller's novel Circe , the titular nymph is questioned by her son about her life that has already spanned some thousand years. The teenaged Telegonus can hardly hide his astonishment upon discovering that his seemingly low-key mother, whom he has lived alone with for sixteen uneventful years on the secluded island of Aeaea, is related to illustrious gods and mighty Titans, and has been acquainted with already legendary figures in Greece's nascent history. "'Mother! You must tell me everything,'" he pleads. Yet far from being flattered by this newfound interest in her marginal existence, Circe is almost resentful and retreats from this rare opportunity to shine: "My past was not some game, some adventure tale. It was the ugly wrack that storms left rotten on the shore." It is a curious, somewhat unfair admission that exposes the mindset of this female divinity. Despite the mythic moments she was witness to and participated in, including being present for the punishment of Prometheus and daring to be the only one of all the gods to secretly offer the wounded Titan a merciful drink to ease his pain, Circe feels she administers no particular control over her destiny, she has no pride in her story. But make no mistake. Her tales are of similar stock to those other gods would eagerly rhapsodize over. Circe's self-deprecation stems from a lifetime of being used, abused and belittled by gods and mortals alike. From birth, she is quick to realize that regardless of her divine heritage, she is little more than an inconsequence. Her mother, the nymph Perse, wrinkles her nose at her newly born daughter's sex. Pasiphaë, her glory-seeking sister, treats her as a constant object of derision to taunt and mock. And in her adolescence, her sun god father Helios declares his daughter to be "the worst of my children, faded and broken, whom I cannot pay a husband to take." Rejected, Circe finds solace in sorcery. She learns the power of herbs and potions and begins to surreptitiously use her newfangled witchcraft to self-serving advantage. She gifts her first love, the fisherman Glaucus, with divinity and turns a rival to her beau's affections into a grotesque six-headed sea monster. But even these impressive magical feats are not enough to garner Circe any particular prestige. Her own father dismisses these transformations as instances of fate that Circe was coincidentally spectator to and had no active hand in invoking. Circe soon begins to understand that her marginality is less to do with the fact that she is a nymph, "least of the lesser goddesses," than that she is a woman. This becomes especially apparent when, exiled on Aeaea, Circe offers drowning wayward sailors refuge in her home. Time and time again the sailors turn on their solitary hostess. Even displaying her divinity makes no difference: "I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered." Her solution is to turn these lustful debauched men into swine. Much of Circe is an exploration into what it means to be female in a world of men and monsters. While it is usually tenuous to compare an author's latest novel to previous work, it does feel as if Miller wrote Circe as a conscious inversion of her prize-winning debut The Song of Achilles in nearly every aspect. The pool of inspiration may be the same – primarily Homer's epics – but whereas Achilles was very much a book about mortal men coming to grips with their own version of masculinity, Circe is about a divine woman trying to consolidate her myriad feminine identities as daughter, sister, lover, mother, witch, and goddess. Even the narrative frames in each of Miller's binary novels take on quasi-gendered forms. In Achilles the story arc is as steady and as unwavering as the trajectory of the sun. From the start the reader knows more or less where the tale will set. In Circe there's a fluidity to plot and narrative that is similar to the tides that surround the nymph's adopted home island. Characters come and go. Those well-versed in Greek myth will particularly delight in cameos from Jason of Argonauts fame, Minos and his namesake Minotaur, and Daedalus, father of that cautionary figure Icarus. That said, Miller provides plenty background for even those unfamiliar with Greek mythology to enjoy her adaptations of these classic myths. By the end of her transformative tale, Circe comes to realize that she has far more control and power over her destiny than she was initially led to believe. Graceful and majestic in equal measures, Circe is sure to leave an indelible impression on readers both new and returning to Miller's singular reworkings of Greek myths.

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Circe by Madeline Miller

17 Dec Circe by Madeline Miller

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“Circe” spans several centuries, offering a deep dive into the life of its eponymous character. It begins with Circe’s childhood in the halls of Helios, her father, where she struggles to find her place among gods and nymphs. She discovers her penchant for witchcraft, a talent that leads to her exile on the island of Aiaia. This isolation becomes both a punishment and a sanctuary, allowing Circe to hone her magical skills and interact with various figures from Greek mythology, including Odysseus, the Minotaur, and Athena. The novel is not just a series of events but a profound exploration of Circe’s evolution from a naive nymph to a powerful sorceress, grappling with her immortality and her desire to understand the mortal world.

Main Characters

• Circe : Initially a timid and overlooked nymph, Circe grows into a formidable witch. Her journey is marked by moments of vulnerability, strength, and deep introspection.
• Odysseus : A clever and complex character, Odysseus’ interaction with Circe adds layers to both their stories.
• Telemachus : Odysseus’ son, who visits Circe and develops a unique bond with her.
• Athena : The goddess who often stands as Circe’s antagonist, representing the capricious and often cruel nature of the gods.

In-Depth Analysis

Miller’s writing is a standout feature, with its lyrical quality and deep emotional resonance. The novel excels in its portrayal of Circe as a multifaceted character, exploring themes of power, isolation, and identity. It also delves into the pettiness and politics of the gods, contrasting it with Circe’s growing affinity for humanity.

• Character Development : Circe’s evolution is the heart of the story. Miller skillfully depicts her transformation, making her a relatable and compelling protagonist.
• Lyrical Prose : The writing style is evocative and poetic, enhancing the mythological setting and the emotional depth of the narrative.
• Pacing : Some readers might find the middle part of the book a bit slow, as it delves deeply into character exploration.

Literary Devices

• Symbolism : Circe’s witchcraft symbolizes her independence and self-discovery.
• Foreshadowing : The novel uses subtle hints to foretell key events, particularly in the interactions between gods and mortals.

Relation to Broader Issues

“Circe” speaks to the universal themes of identity, power dynamics, and the nature of humanity. It also touches on gender roles and the struggle for autonomy, particularly resonant in the #MeToo era.

“Circe” will appeal to fans of Greek mythology, character-driven narratives, and feminist literature. It stands out for its fresh take on a mythological figure often relegated to the margins of these stories. Readers who enjoyed “The Song of Achilles,” also by Miller, or “The Silence of the Girls” by Pat Barker, will likely find this novel captivating.

Potential Audiences

• Fans of Greek mythology and retellings.
• Readers interested in feminist narratives.
• Those who appreciate character-driven stories and lyrical prose.

Thematic Analysis

The novel deeply explores themes like female empowerment, the nature of divinity versus humanity, and the search for identity. Circe’s journey is a powerful representation of breaking free from societal constraints and finding one’s voice.

Stylistic Elements

Miller’s prose is rich and poetic, bringing a modern sensibility to ancient myths. Her use of vivid imagery and careful pacing adds depth to the narrative and characters.

Comparison with Other Works

“Circe” can be compared to “The Song of Achilles” in its retelling of Greek myths with a humanistic perspective. It also shares thematic similarities with works like “The Penelopiad” by Margaret Atwood, offering a feminist perspective on classical stories.

Potential Test Questions with Answers

• It represents her transformation from an ignored nymph to a powerful witch, allowing her to explore her abilities and independence.
• She portrays him as complex and flawed, focusing on his cunning and moral ambiguities.

Awards and Recognitions

“Circe” was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019 and received critical acclaim for its innovative approach to myth retelling.

Bibliographic Information

• Title : Circe
• Author : Madeline Miller
• Publication Date : 2018
• Publisher : Little, Brown and Company
• ISBN : 978-0316556347

BISAC Categories:

• Historical – Ancient
• Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology
• War & Military

Summaries of Awards and Other Reviews

• Mythopoeic Fantasy Award Nominee for Adult Literature (2019)
• ALA Alex Award (2019) ,
• Tähtifantasia Award Nominee (2022)
• Women’s Prize for Fiction Nominee (2019)
• The Kitschies for Red Tentacle (Best Novel) (2019) ,
• Goodreads Choice Award for Fantasy (2018)
• Book of the Month Book of the Year Award (2018) ,
• RUSA CODES Reading List Nominee for Historical Fiction (2019)

#1  New York Times  Bestseller — named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the  Washington Post ,  People ,  Time , Amazon,  Entertainment Weekly ,  Bustle, Newsweek, the A.V. Club, Christian Science Monitor, Refinery 29, Buzzfeed, Paste, Audible, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Thrillist, NYPL, Self, Real Simple, Goodreads, Boston Globe, Electric Literature, BookPage, the Guardian, Book Riot, Seattle Times, and Business Insider.

Purchasing Links

Is this book a series.

“Circe” is a standalone novel. However, Madeline Miller’s other work, “The Song of Achilles,” explores similar themes in a different mythological context.

About Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller is an American novelist and classics scholar. Her debut novel, “The Song of Achilles,” also received critical acclaim and awards. Miller is known for her ability to reimagine ancient myths with contemporary relevance and emotional depth.

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Book Reviews

'circe' gives the witch of the odyssey a new life.

Annalisa Quinn

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"Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting," says the hero of Madeleine Miller's Circe , of her romance with the mortal Odysseus. Circe is referring to Homer's version of the story, in which Odysseus arrives on her island sea-battered and mourning for his men killed by the cruel Laestrygonians. Circe entraps his remaining men and turns them into pigs. But Odysseus, with the help of the god Hermes, tricks Circe and makes her beg for mercy before becoming her lover.

"I was not surprised by the portrait of myself," Circe says, "the proud witch undone before the hero's sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime for poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep."

Miller's lush, gold-lit novel — told from the perspective of the witch whose name in Greek has echoes of a hawk and a weaver's shuttle -- paints another picture: of a fierce goddess who, yes, turns men into pigs, but only because they deserve it.

Though most of Circe's fame derives from her short encounter with Odysseus in Book 10 of the Odyssey, Miller's novel covers a longer and more complex life: her lonely childhood among the gods, her first encounter with mortals, who "looked weak as mushroom gills" next to the "vivid and glowing" divinities, the awakening of her powers, and finally, the men who wash up on her shores, souring her trust with their cruelty.

'Women & Power' Links Today's Trolls With Ancient Ancestors

In 'ODY-C,' A Greek Hero Worthy Of Women

Circe is a nymph, daughter of the sun god Helios, banished to the island of Aiaia for using magic to turn a romantic rival into the monster Scylla. Alone, she begins to hone her craft. "For a hundred generations, I have walked the world, drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease," she thinks. "Then I learned I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt."

A classics teacher, Miller is clearly on intimate terms with the Greek poem. The character of Circe only occupies a few dozen lines of it, but Miller extracts worlds of meaning from Homer's short phrases. For instance, Homer cryptically describes Circe as having a "human voice," leading centuries of readers to wonder: What is a divine voice? Do the gods have a language? Miller makes Circe's human voice the beginning of a (fraught, because inherently temporary) kinship with mortals that is one of the novel's loveliest strains.

But my favorite of Miller's small recalibrations is less lofty: It has to do with Circe's hairdo. In Homer, Circe is identified with her "lovely braids." The usual scholarly gloss on this is that the braids signal not only beauty, but also exoticism, because Eastern goddesses wore their hair in braids. But in Circe , the braids come about in the first moments of the goddess's magical awakening, when she begins roaming the island to find ingredients for her spells: "I learned to braid my hair back, so it would not catch on every twig, and how to tie my skirts at the knee to keep the burrs off." It's a small detail, but it's the difference between a person of independence and skill, and some male dream of danger, foreignness, and sex, lounging with parted lips while she watches the horizon for ships.

"We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her," wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch . Why, she asks, do we never hear of another kind of love, which also "must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires" — a vocation? Circe insists that labor, as much as love, makes a life: "No wonder I have been so slow," she thinks when she discovers magic. "All this while, I have been a weaver without wool, a ship without the sea." This Circe braids her hair because she has work to do.

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By Madeline Miller

Book review and synopsis for Circe by Madeline Miller, an elegant and delightful retelling of Greek mythological tales.

Circe is the daughter of Helios, God of the Sun, and Perse, an Oceanid nymph. Despite her divinity, she is less beautiful and lacks the skills of her siblings, so she is largely shunned and ridiculed among the godly.

When she falls in love with a mortal who, of course, is fated to age and die, she is desperate enough to experiment with a different and illicit type of power -- potions and witchcraft, and with it she discovers her own ability to bend the world to her will.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

Circe is born a God, the daughter of a Titan and a water nymph. However, she lacks the powers of her siblings and is less beautiful. They treat her unkindly, except for Aeëtes , but he is granted a kingdom and leaves.

Circe falls in love with Glaucos , a mortal fisherman. In hopes of making Glaucos immortal, Circe learns about illicit Pharmaka , herbs endowed with power that only grow where Gods have fallen. She transforms Glaucos into a Sea-God, but he soon becomes enamored with the beautiful but malicious Scylla . Circe turns Scylla into a sea monster.

Circe is exiled to the empty island of Aiaia for her use of witchcraft, and there she hones her knowledge of herbs and magic. One day, Daedalus , a famed mortal craftsman, arrives at Aiaia, requesting help for Pasiphaë , Circe's sister. In Knossos, Pasiphaë gives birth to a Minotaur. Circe uses magic to manage its hunger, and Daedalus builds it a labyrinthine cage. Daedalus is forced to help because they have his son, Icarus. Daedalus later tries to build wings to help his son escape Knossos, but Icarus flies too close to the sun and dies. Daedalus later dies from old age.

Next, Medea (Aeëtes's daughter) and Jason , arrive at Aiaia, asking to be cleansed. Medea has murdered her own brother and used magic to help Jason acquire a golden fleece. Circe warns Medea that Jason's feeling for Medea will wane now that she is no longer useful to him, and Medea angrily departs.

Later, Alke , the daughter of a lesser river lord, is sent to serve Circe, now known as the Witch of Aiaia, as a punishment. Soon, others adopt the idea and send their troublesome daughters there, too. One day, sailors show up. Circe offers them food, but the captain attacks her so turns them into pigs. Other sailors go to Aiaia when they hear of the island of Nymphs. At first Circe attempts to suss out if they are honest men, but Circe eventually assumes they are all dishonest and turns them all into pigs.

One day, Odysseus and his men arrive. He has an herb that prevents Circe from harming him. She finds him charming, sleeps with him and promises not to harm him. For a year, he stays as he mends his ship. Circe knows he is married, but she yearns for him to stay. Before he leaves, Circe sends him to a prophet and warns about the obstacles in his trip home (Scylla, etc.).

But Circe is pregnant and her mortal son, Telegonus , is soon born. Athena wants the child dead and offers her eternal blessings in exchange, but Circe refuses. Instead, Circe uses powerful magic to protect the island. Telegonus grows up, but longs to visit his father. Circe finally relents and helps him gather protections for the journey. She agrees to suffer eternal pain to acquire a deadly weapon, the tail of Trygon , a sea god. But Trygon ultimately doesn't extract the price and simply tells her to return it when she's done.

Telegonus leaves for Ithaca, but returns quickly because Odysseus is dead. Odysseus misunderstood his intentions and fought him instead, scratching himself on the Trygon's tail. Circe realizes that Athena wanted Telegonus dead to prevent this. Telegonus has also brought Telemachus (Odysseus’s other son) and Penelope (Odysseus’s wife) to the island. Penelope is worried Athena will claim Telemachus in Odysseus's absence and hopes for Circe's protection. Circe uses her magic to protect them, but Athena makes her demands. She wants Telemachus to leave and start an empire, but he has no desire for glory and power. However, Telegonus longs for adventure, and he accepts instead.

With Telegonus gone, Circe calls for her father, demanding that he talk to Zeus and release her from exile. She threatens to tell Zeus the Titans' secrets and start a war. Free to leave, Circe and Telemachus go to turn Scylla into stone, and Circe confides in Telemachus all her secrets. (Telemachus fills her in on what ended up happening with Medea — Jason married another. Medea kills the new wife and murders her children. A golden chariot whisks her home.) Penelope becomes an expert on herbs and becomes the Witch of Aiaia instead.

The book ends with Circe making a potion to bring forth her true self. She then has a vision of herself as a mortal, growing old with Telemachus. She drinks the potion.

For more detail, see the full Section-by-Section Summary .

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Book Review

Circe , by Madeline Miller, came out early last year, and I’ve been keen to find time for it, so it seemed like a good book to kick off the spring season.

It’s a re-telling the story of Circe, a character originated circa 8th century B.C. by Homer. In Homer’s in The Odyssey , Odysseus encounters her on the island of Aeaea where she is villainously doling out dangerous potions and turning men into pigs.

While in her original incarnation she’s mostly an obstacle to be overcome, in Miller’s reinvented tale, she’s given a new life, as well as a meaningful and imaginative story deeply rooted in a myriad of mythological tales.

The Palace at Knossos in Crete

A while back, I took a trip to Greece and visited one of the locations that appears briefly in the book, the remains of Minos’s Palace at Knossos in Crete. It was about a hour out from where we were staying, so we had to rent a car, and it was a whole mess, but I desperately wanted to see it.

I’ve come across other references to this site then, but Circe was the first book that ever made me reminisce about it. Reading Circe, I could imagine that crumbling Minoan archaeological site, thousands upon thousands of years old, as a living, breathing palace, gleaming with splendor and marveling that I’d once walked those walkways as well.

Miller’s mythological retelling is so dazzlingly alive . She uses Circe’s story to bring in a whole host of other mythologies, ranging from the Titanomachy (“battle of the Titans”) to the Gift of Fire, various other parts of the Odyssey and so on. The events of these stories all overlap, one washing over the next, intertwining in a delightful and inventive manner. Under Miller’s imaginative gaze, these classic stories are endowed with a newfound energy. Fleshed-out and lively, it’s a pleasure to read, especially if you’re someone who loves mythological tales.

The most difficult part of reading Circe for me was that it took forever because whenever a mention of any character came up, I was always tempted to look them up on Wikipedia to see what parts of their story originate from where. This inevitably led me down deep, and I mean deep , rabbit holes of endless Wikipedia entries and other sources filled with mythological esoterica. (But honestly, I’d consider that a feature, not a bug, when it comes to reading).

Ulysses at the Palace of Circe by Wilhelm Schubert van Ehrenberg (1667)

Themes and Character Development

By the second half of the book, Circe has been alive for over a thousand years. She becomes more reflective about her experiences during various interludes, and certainly when Circe’s story takes a darker turn. At those junctions, Miller is thoughtful and introspective. In the book’s more somber moments, Miller explores Circe’s loneliness, alienation, and how her perceptions may have been warped by her experiences or misunderstandings.

Through the relationship of the gods, Titans, Olympians, lesser gods, mortals and so forth, the book contemplates the meaning of having power, how power is derived and how power effects how people relate to each other. Furthermore, using a range of classic Greek Myths to tell a story provides the perfect foundation and a wide berth to delve into fundamental questions about morals and goodness and pragmatism and ambition and balancing it all with the need to survive and protect yourself.

I loved what a complete character Circe is. She is complex, imperfect and is consistently drawn in a way that grounds her in reality, despite her divine origins.

Read it or Skip it?

I loved this book. I loved this book so much, it actually surprises me how strongly I feel about it. If you like mythology, Circe is a must read, no caveats. It is such a vivid and wonderful story that brings together so many bits and pieces of Greek mythology and somehow turns them into a cohesive book that is well worth your time. It is all at once thoughtful and entertaining and elegantly written. I was delighted by it.

If you aren’t as into mythology, I still think the story is very worthwhile, though you may have to exercise a bit more patience as you get grounded in all the characters and their stories. I’d really encourage you to give it a shot though if you’re looking for an entertaining, yet meaningful and complex story.

Circe won me over about 20 pages in, and it only got better from there. It’s honestly been quite a few years since I’ve found a book I loved as much as this one, so my feeling can be summed up as follows: 1) I’m sad it’s over, 2) I can’t believe I waited so long to read this, and 3) I need to go buy a copy of Madeline Miller’s previous novel, The Song of Achilles .

Have you read this and what did you think? See Circe on Amazon .

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of Circe

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Been meaning to read this. Do you think reading it in electronic format is OK? Some books lose something when read on a device.

Funny you should ask! I actually read half of it as an ebook and half of it on hard copy (I had a hard copy but forgot to bring it and didn’t want to stop reading. Of course, by the end I loved it so much I went out and bought a first edition signed copy, haha, so now I actually have two.)

Anyway, my point is, it’s definitely readible as an ebook, I did just fine with it. But if you’re like me, maybe you’ll just end up wanting it regardless. Mostly my advice is to read it ASAP because it’s really good. :)

Perfect. Thanks!

Thanks for reminding me about this! I’ve added both Miller books to my TBR. We’re great fans of Greek mythology around here: I was hooked during my childhood, when the marionette puppeteers who used to make the rounds of the schools put on a “Golden Fleece” show; and my kids grew up watching the 1950s “Jason and the Argonauts” movie, when it was finally released on video, just as I had been raised on it, back when it was released to broadcast TV (I still love those ancient special effects).

Oh, I’m excited on your behalf, I think you’re going to love it! I honestly don’t understand how anyone can NOT love mythology, it’s so fascinating and fun and dramatic. That’s so awesome they did a Golden Fleece show, it sounds like that would be so much fun! Thanks for your thoughts and happy happy reading! Hope you’re having a great weekend!

I hadn’t thought about the puppet shows for years, and had forgotten the name of the troupe, but it must have been the Cole Marionettes (see Mr. Cole’s obituary, which mentions the Jason and the Golden Fleece show: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-10-21-8603190250-story.html ). The puppet shows were an eagerly anticipated annual event at our elementary school, but the only one I remember is the Golden Fleece. Greek mythology rocks! :)

Oooh! I’ve been hearing nothing but good things about this book! It’s waiting on my shelf … I think it’ll make a good July read?

Yes, do it! I actually bought this book back in September or somewhere around there and I still can’t believe I let it sit there for so long, haha. Hope you love it!

I adored Circe, and The Song of Achilles!

I’m really excited for the Song of Achilles, though I’m a little scared my expectations are way too high now, haha. :)

This has been on my TBR list for awhile. I hope I can get to it soon. Thanks for your thoughts.

So many books, so little time, such a familiar feelings, haha. This one is really good though. Hope you love it if you get a chance to read it!

Yeah this book is amazing.

Right?! The best part about book blogging is getting to chat with others about how awesome a book is when you find one you love… thanks for dropping by!

So glad you read this book!!! Honestly one of our favorites!!! You have to read A Song of Achilles, because like Circe it draws you into Ancient Greece like nothing before! When you get the chance to read, come check our review and tell us your thoughts as well!!

Thanks for dropping by! I’ll give your review a read later today, thanks for the heads up!

Glad to see you enjoyed this book so much! I listened to the audio last summer and found the story lively – it moves at such an absorbing pace, from start to finish.

Yeah, I was surprised how evenly paced it was considering how much of the book hinges on understanding her internal thought processes. I feel like it’s hard to write that stuff in a way that doesn’t make the book drag. I think it worked well in Circe because she does a fantastic job of “showing” you how her perspective on things is shaped, etc. instead of just doing a bunch of internal monologues. Thanks for dropping by!

I finished it today and absolutely love it. your review is beautiful

Thank you for the kind comment! Glad to connect with people who loved this book as well! :) Cheers!

This book was fantastic. Appreciate the review.

Thanks for dropping by and thanks for reading!

Thanks for your review, I’ve been meaning to read this book and whilst I’m not a huge fan of her previous book, I have to admit she has a beautiful writing and a melancholy that I like. Can’t wait to read this one.

Oh, I’m sad to hear you didn’t like A Song of Achilles. I’m really curious about it — I haven’t read it yet so unfortunately I have no insight to provide on a comparison between the two, but I hope you do like Circe, and thanks for reading the review!

Oh it’s not that I didn’t like it, it’s just that the first half of the book was a nit difficult for me. I didn’t quite like how the story was told, but the second half was amazing. I cried by the time it ends. Anw, I love reading your reviews, it’s always well written.

This book does deserve a glowing review! Loved it too!

I honestly can’t believe I didn’t read it sooner! Thanks for dropping by!

I wrote about Circe in my dissertation so it seems incredible I still haven’t read it!! Fingers crossed I get round to it soon!!

I bet you’ll love it! Thanks for reading!

I absolutely rave about this book as well! I was lucky enough to hear Madeline Miller talk about it at an author event – especially hearing her read sections aloud, based on the Ancient Greek oral traditions of storytelling. Your review sums up everything I enjoyed about Circe, I particularly like what you said about the book exploring power and morals in general. It’s amazing how easy it is to relate to the characters, even though they are divine beings living thousands of years ago! 😊

Oh that’s awesome, I’m jealous I would’ve loved to hear that. I’m so glad other people loved this book too! :) Thanks for dropping by!

Nicely written review. I’ll think I’ll read the book.

Thank you! Hope you like it if you get a chance to read it!

I liked Circe :) just wished she had gone deeper into the stories of the other gods!

I’ve just finished this book and the tears are still drying on my cheeks. I was so moved by her relationships with mortals, while the gods were cold and almost lifeless – as the author intended. There are so many themes to explore here. I borrowed a friend’s copy but might have to buy my own so I can revisit this intriguing and complex take on Circe – and spend some more time exploring the many threads of mythology that weave their way through the tale as you clearly have done. Thanks for the great review.

I just finished the audio version of Madelne Miller’s “Circe” narrated by Perdita Weeks. It was an astoundng experience to hear Circe’s story in Circe’s voice.

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BOOK REVIEW: Circe by Madeline Miller

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I will review Circe by Madeline Miller. At a later date, I will also review The Song of Achilles , by the same author. Like all my reviews, this one too has spoilers.

Circe by Madeline Miller was first published on April 10 th , 2018, and it has become a critically acclaimed novel since then, winning, for example, the 2018 Book of the Year Award allotted by the Book of the Month subscription book box service and the 2019 Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in the Indies Choice Book Awards of that year. It was also selected as Book of the Year by media outlets such as Buzzfeed , Refinery29 , The Daily Telegraph , Guardian , Time Magazine , Washington Post , among others. Additionally, it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, which the author had previously won for her debut novel The Song of Achilles in 2012. Moreover, the book received an exorbitant number of reviews praising it for its lyrical writing style, for making Greek mythology (more specifically, Homer’s The Iliad , with The Song of Achilles , and The Odyssey , with Circe ) more accessible to modern readers, for giving a feminist voice to one of the most enigmatic and intriguing figures of both Greek mythology and Western literature but who, at the same time, has been a victim of a narrative told by men, for giving her both a complex and sympathetic nature that has made modern readers identify with her more easily, despite having been born a goddess, in her various roles as witch, mother, wife, and lover…

Truth be told, it’s an impressive list of accolades. And I was a little hesitant to buy the book and read it when I first started seeing it everywhere. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey are books that I read in college, and to this day, The Iliad is my favorite book of all time. It is the book that made me fall in love with reading. So, needless to say, I’m an avid reader of Greek mythology. Books like Bulfinch’s Mythology , Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton, both Mythos and Heroes by Stephen Fry as well as Troy , countless copies of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, Helen of Troy by Margaret George, the recently released A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (see my review here ), The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (see my review here) and of course both The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller are all on my bookshelves. My reluctance to buy Circe when I was still debating whether to get it or not, however, was due to the fact that I didn’t know if it would live up to the hype. Nonetheless, I was still willing to give it a chance.

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”

And I really liked it. In The Odyssey , Circe only appears in one book (chapter) of the poem. However, that was enough for her to leave her mark both in Greek mythology and Western literature even though she would also become one of the most misunderstood deities of the Greek pantheon because of her role as a sorceress and the image of a witch that transforms sailors into pigs that she gains just to force/convince Odysseus to stay with her and become her lover. But like most women in history and, in this case, mythology, there is more to Circe’s art of witchcraft and her ability to metamorphosize humans into pigs. Unfortunately, none of that is explained in Homer’s epic poem. Thus, she has been severely maligned by history and those that wrote it; like most women, she has not been given a chance to tell her own story. And that is what Madeline Miller has set out to do, and, boy, what a voice she has given her!

In Miller’s book, Circe is the daughter of the Titan Helios and the nymph Perse. But from a very early age, Circe knows that she is a pariah in her father’s house (palace) and is not wanted. She is deemed strange and different from all the other gods and goddesses, both Titans and Olympians alike. This, however, makes her dangerous to others and she is never fully accepted by those around her. Thus Madeline Miller puts forth the theme of the novel: that of a woman struggling to find a place for herself in a man’s (or gods’) world (something that many modern women can relate to) and, by extension, a longing of homecoming—a theme borrowed from The Odyssey , which chronicles Odysseus’ journey back home after the fall of Troy. Circe’s own journey and search for a home, a place where she can both belong to and be herself, however, begins ironically when she meets another Titan, her uncle Prometheus, who has been punished by Zeus for having given the gift of fire to mortals. And it is during this encounter that Circe first hears about mortals and can’t help but compare them to the gods and goddesses she has known all of her life. It is from this encounter with her uncle also that humans will thereafter be forever linked to Circe’s life, Odysseus chief among them.

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”

The first mortal Circe meets is Glaucos, whom she irrevocably falls in love with. Her love for him is such that she does everything in her power to turn him into a god, and she achieves this with the help of some flowers and herbs. She is, however, the first of her kind to ever accomplish this feat. And because nymphs have never been known to do this, no matter how much they’ve wanted to transform the objects of their affections into immortals, we know now that Circe is not a nymph despite having been born from one because she was able to transform Glaucos into a god.

Glaucos, however, changes completely once he is immortal and spurns Circe for her nemesis Scylla. And out of spite and jealousy, Circe transforms her into a six-headed monster. Circe, however, regrets her actions almost immediately and confesses her crime to her father. Helios, on the other hand, doesn’t believe her but when she shows him how she did it, she is deemed a danger to the gods and is exiled to Aiaia.

Aiaia, however, turns out to be the home Circe has always yearned for… and it is here that she hones the art of her witchcraft both by taming the animals of the island, for example, and making them into her companions and by tending her garden. But however beautiful her new home is, Circe is still lonely. And to abate the feeling, she welcomes both gods and mortals to her island, among them the messenger god Hermes, Daedalus, Jason and Medea, and Odysseus, who arrives at her doorstep to ask her to change his crew back into humans after she transforms them into pigs for trying to steal from her. 

“Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”

            All of these “visitors” to Circe’s island and her interactions with them, however, are important for her own transformation from a goddess to a mortal, a decision she makes at the end of the novel in order to both live and die during her husband’s lifetime. What is interesting about this is that her own transformation is both the complete opposite of how the novel began, where she transforms Glaucos into a god, and is the culmination of her own powers and gift, the gift of transformation, thus bringing the novel to a full circle. That was very well done. I gave this novel an A New Favorite rating.

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Book Review: Circe by Madeline Miller

Before I begin, I think it’s important to note that I opened Circe having almost zero prior knowledge about mythology . Despite majoring in English in college, I never had to read mythology. Crazy huh?

The Summary

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.

Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

The Book Review

I was immediately pulled into Circe . It was so different from what I normally read, and I fell into the world of mythology with abandon.

And then…the fizzle.

Let’s back up here for a minute, though. Circe is a child in the beginning of the book, and I loved her story. She lives in the house of Helios (her dad, whose chariot pulls the sun across the sky every day), and is generally unliked by all the other gods, including her own family. It’s strange, but pulled me in.

However, even in the beginning, the sheer number of characters in Circe is super overwhelming. I had to keep pausing when names were mentioned to remember who it was, or try to wrap my head around him/her if it was a new character. Mythology is like that, so it makes sense, but man, it made for a difficult read when I was more interested in the story arc than the characters.

This book fizzled a little for me as it went on. I expected more of a story arc, but what I got was more like mythology itself – shorter stories that make a whole. Sure, it was chronological about Circe’s life, but for me, there wasn’t really a peak of any kind – it just kind of rumbled on. Of course, it’s based off of the existing story of Circe, so I don’t think Miller could have done a whole lot to remedy this.

Circe was compelling enough throughout to keep me reading and mostly enjoying, but I do have to say that I was happy to get to the end and put it behind me. Although it was a bit of a slog for me at times, I would recommend it to someone with more of an interest in mythology. I thought the writing was great and it was well done overall, so I gave it 4 stars.

Looking for more awesome books about Greek mythology? Check out our list of Best Fiction Books About Greek Mythology .

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I'm currently a full-time writer/content strategist with an English degree living in Minneapolis, MN. I created Literary Quicksand to feed my love of books, writing, and community. More About Me

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Book Review: “Circe” by Madeline Miller

Teju Cole, in describing the way a curtain hangs in one of the many German hotel rooms he has inhabited, describes the creases in the fabric as “the divine enfolded in skin.” He sees, in the simplicity of the fabric, an enriching power of the self rooted in the body—the way it bends and creases, at rest and motion simultaneously, expands, contracts, inhales, exhales. A self-supporting system in an imbroglio of entangled systems stitched together to create a curtain, a swath of cloth, cut from other cloth, made from other threads and folds, bendable, luminescent. A creator of light and shadow alike. It blocks the all-mighty glow of an imposing sun; it enshrines the human spatially in a cocoon.

He finds, then, in this fabric, the power humans have over themselves; a seemingly divine power that, when pushed from the inside out, swells into being. The ordinariness of the human, the specificity of the lives they live, the vitality of their self-hood, the richness of their efforts, are endowed by themselves with power.

Madeline Miller’s book Circe bears conceptual similarities; in the nuances of its mythos it enfolds the electric, kinetic capabilities of our humanity in the self-made, effortful portrait of Circe, a witch who—through the tenacity of her own desires—swells into a power of her own construction.

In the book, Miller gives an epic retelling of Circe’s mythical legacy; sprung from the shadow of the space outside the page, she pieces several stories together—Odysseus’s journey and death, the tale of Telemachus, the Trojan War, amongst others.

Circe, daughter of the Titan Helios, banished to the island Aiaia for turning a nymph—Scylla—into a hulking monster, struggles with the loneliness of exile, the cruelties of men, the fears of motherhood, and the immeasurable journey of growing old and strong in her own skin (mostly while she is alone, as the world unfolds around her). To summarize the book would be to reconnect the stories which hold Circe as a unifying thread (the plight of Medea, the odyssey of Odysseus, the birth of the Minotaur and its labyrinth, all stack atop each other as moments testing the power, resolve, and affection of a witch growing into the vibrancies of her power).

Despite the fact that the book is structured in this long-winding, seemingly patchwork sense, rooted in the interiority of a character locked in perpetual stasis reaching outward into the world through the people she encounters, Miller colors the text with a vibrant, electric, and archaic voice, rich in the translatory power of the ancient myth, but rooted in the familiarity of the human.

For instance, when her son—Telegonus, son of Odysseus—asks her permission to leave the island, Circe is upset. Athena has placed a threat upon her and her son, vowing to take him for her own in an act of revenge against Odysseus. In an attempt to keep the goddess at bay, Circe cloaks the island in magic; a spell to hide the island, another to keep Athena away, a dual concoction tied to Circe’s own person and life force, an extension of herself in divine form, an exhausting effort, especially in its early creation, as the unruly baby Telegonus challenged her will. Now, her only son, who for sixteen years has been by her side and poses as a sliver of the man she fell in love with within the years past, seeks not only to leave her side but to step head-first into death. “For sixteen years,” Circe fumes, “I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me, to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping” (Miller 272).

Here, Miller places Circe at the center of a web. Around her rests her son and his ambitions, the spell protecting them both from an all-powerful threat, the effort of that magic, the toil of working and stitching the spell together from the earth to make the enchantment—an entangled thread being pulled loose from Circe’s fingers. This tension, however, is not inhibitory; rather, it allows Circe to grow into herself further—she eventually allows Telegonus to go, outfitting him with an all-powerful weapon—the tail of Trygon, whose venom kills even gods upon contact—which she acquired by facing Trygon himself, prepared to bear eternal pain for the sake of her son (she comes out unharmed).

This network defines the intensity of Circe’s journey. She is poised against a heap of conflict that rests outside her agency (i.e. the threat of Athena, the notion of eternal pain to save her son,) and enshrouds herself in a power born from the vitality of her own personhood. It is not an outside entity from whom Circe derives her power, nor an abstract divinity; she weaves spells from the toil of work, cultivating the earth, communing with it to produce a reaction through a kind of symbiosis. It moves, from the inside of her body outwards, in congruence with the earth, not in a binary dynamic, but a shared, collective. Likewise, in the face of certain pain, she steps forward to accept its weight from Trygon for her son, a sacrifice that she did not have to make, because the notion of the act itself was enough to sway him. In other words, Circe, by the fortitude of her own resolve, creates her own power, and uses it to denature the forces around her that meddle in the vitality of her life and love. No one can harm Telegonus; how could they, against a figure, a mother, engulfed by the vitality of love, found within herself, and given manifestation in the physical earth through magic?

Circe pours power from within herself, formalizing it in her decisions and her magic, creating a network with the outside world—including its conflicts—that is enriched by her own femininity, her own motherhood. In a world that seeks to strangle her power as a woman, she—in an act of divine resiliency—crafts its antithesis.

As a result, Miller constructs a story that, with its mythical form, is able to bend itself into new angles, that it may prismatically produce new bursts of light. Circe is reworked from a figure of antagonistic sentiment to a nuanced, rich, and complex character, tangible, vibrant, and electrified by the sheerness of her humanity, by her proximity to us as readers. Mythos, here, is a film, a medium, on which Miller has painted a figure of self-making power in the form of Circe.

Her prose behaves in a similar fashion. Miller’s prose is active, spiced with the same effort of Circe’s resolve: “I cupped my own hands in the dark,” Miller writes, “ I did not have a thousand wiles, and I was no fixed star, yet, for the first time I felt something in that space. A hope, a living breath, that might yet grow between” (226). From this void, the ethereal miasma of existence and nonexistence, the eternal “middle ground” within which we intersect and translate ourselves and the world around us, Miller stitches together a narrative bound by other narratives, a story folded within stories, exhuming a rich, resonant voice from between the blank verse of classical texts.

Her prose, at once incantatory and catalogic, capable of erupting with kinetic force to catalyze the story into motion (I tremble at the cosmic, hulking mass of tentacles Scylla spills from her body to halt Circe’s journey to Minos,) and likewise calm, tranquil, a miasma of image and sensation, of plants and vines swimming before her eyes, dirtying her hands, latching beneath the beds of her nails, clinging to nest-like hair. It is more than illustration; the book moves fluidly as a paintbrush, gliding with tenacity before slowing at the minute details that define and enrich the piece itself.

As a result, Miller’s book is rich with a self-creating vibrancy, a woven, viscous tapestry. It is shaped, like clay, from the effort of her own hands, just as Circe creates her own cosmic power, reaching into herself, into the earth, “elbow deep” at times to pull from the “divinity enfolded” in her skin. The book is Miller’s own testament to this work, and is as powerful, spellbinding, and moving as the sacrifices her Circe makes, as the power she makes from the calluses of her well-worn hands. 

Published in Arts & Reviews

Dylan Walawander is a third-term student studying literature and film. He is a book critic contributing review essays, essays on fiction, and nonfiction works. He is also a website administrator.

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Circe Says: Ancient wisdom for modern problems

Circe is an ancient Greek minor goddess who spends her days on X, chronicling the late-stage American empire and dispensing advice on life and love in the digital era. You can submit your advice questions to her directly at Circe @vocalcry .

Let's say you wanted to escape a cult. Let’s say the cult is academia, to keep things abstract. How would you do it?

When you consider that the number of people with freshly minted PhDs every year far exceeds the number of people who join the Church of Scientology, it is worth asking how academia continues to find young recruits willing to give away years of their productive lives to engage in esoteric rituals in near poverty and social isolation for a slim chance at life-of-the-mind transcendence.

The one quality that most cult members share is that they’re looking for an all-powerful mentor (or, in your case, a dissertation advisor) — a figurative daddy who will reward them when they’re good and scold them when they’re bad. Academics have this in spades. They’ve never developed an identity outside of being the teacher’s pet, and they struggle to make decisions without envisioning what grade they will get on their report card in life.

Leaving academia involves recognizing that you’re in a cult and learning to accept that there is no final report card. The only grade you’ll get in life is pass/fail, which will only be awarded to you by a higher power. If you can come to terms with this, you might have a chance at escape. And if you can’t, joining a tech startup is always an option.

I have read many 'red-pill' books to try to understand what men want. They all seem to be aimed at manipulating a woman’s desire for love to extract intimacy, only to lose interest in the woman afterward. I am losing hope about relationships and genuinely questioning why these men express that their version of true love is harems and cheating. Do any men truly love women? Is this really what love is about?

A healthy relationship with both parents and a normal adolescent romantic awakening: no “red-pill” guru had both. Like all ideologies constructed around a master narrative to explain the world, “red-pill” concepts are founded on a grain of truth and distorted to massive proportions to attract a target audience. In this sense, the “red pill” is no different from Marxism, radical feminism, or any other ideology that preys on minds desperate for clarity in a world that is full of complexity.

It is true that, on average, there are biological and psychological differences between men and women that require a theory of mind to appreciate fully and that being aware of these differences can help bridge the gap between the sexes, especially in the context of a relationship. The “red pill” organizes some of these differences into a seemingly coherent worldview that serves as a basis to justify the manipulation of women by men to often unsavory ends.

It is worth noting, however, that every single “red-pill” guru eventually repents and comes to the conclusion that a monogamous relationship with one woman is more fulfilling than living like a degenerate. Dan Bilzerian is only the most recent in a long line of “red-pill” prodigal sons — without exception, all of these men eventually reach the same conclusion.

It is also worth noting that the average well-socialized, well-adjusted man will never consume red-pill content, let alone create red-pill content. This latter pool of men is the one you should be fishing in when looking for love, which is a very real and wonderful thing. I cannot tell you where or when you will find your Prince Charming, but I can categorically tell you that he will not have internet brainworms.

Are you wasting a girl's time by continuing to date her if, after six months, you can't yet see a future involving marriage but otherwise have no good reason to break up? If so, how to best end things without sounding mean? If not, how long do you wait to see if marital visions develop?

The short answer is yes, and the long answer is also yes.

Most men know when they meet the woman they want to build a future with early on, usually much earlier than six months. If it hasn’t developed, it isn’t likely to develop with the passage of time. If you are looking for a wife (presumably, she’s looking for a husband), then not seeing a future involving marriage IS a good reason to break up. Not only is it a good reason, it’s the best reason.

Every day you spend with a person you don’t see a future with is a day you’re robbing from both of you [time] that can be spent either in search of a spouse or in the company of that spouse. It is never pleasant to end things, but be honest about not seeing a future even if you can only offer vague reasons as to why. A woman will be far less upset about being rejected after six months than about being strung along for years only to eventually break up anyway and hear that you married another woman that you met only six months ago.

Console yourself with the thought that 10 years from now, you’ll both be happily married to other people and that you’re taking a step today to ensure that future. And if the thought of ending up with other people instead of one other makes you sad and regretful, maybe it’s worth reconsidering and buying a ring. But please — no moissanite.

I have a raging desire to set my boss on fire, and I’m exhausted by this and want it to end. How do I get over my desire to set my boss on fire?

Buy a ticket to Burning Man and superimpose your boss’s face onto the burning effigy with the Apple Vision Pro. Or you can just find a new job.

Circe, how do I get over relentless heartbreak?

Barthes and Stendhal exhausted many words on this very dilemma to no avail, but as a 1000+-year-old goddess (though who’s counting), I’ve had centuries to test out various theories (turning your beloved’s object of affection into a sea monster does NOT work), and I’m here to offer practical solutions.

First, give yourself a predetermined period to grieve. Watch sad movies, vent to anyone who will listen, read "The Sorrows of Young Werther" — whatever makes all of those melancholy feelings bubble to the surface. Don’t bury ... them; tragedy cleanses the soul. But you MUST be disciplined about the cut-off time for this period.

Second, do not have any contact with this person. Hide any and all evidence of their existence. Do not stalk their social media. Do not ask your friends about them. For all intents and purposes, you must disappear them from your life.

Third, make a list of everything you dislike about them, even if it’s totally ridiculous minutiae — their shoes, their eyebrows, anything that inspires even mild distaste. Anytime you reminisce about them, read the list. Read it again. Then eat a cookie. This is no longer the time for philosophical musings. You must not be above subjecting yourself to operant conditioning.

Fourth, find a way to distract yourself with something that gives you purpose: work, friends, hobbies, etc. Getting in shape never hurts. Keep busy in a way that feels productive.

If you follow this plan without cheating, you are guaranteed to feel better in about six months. Trust me, if I can get over Glaucus, you can get over anyone.

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