The King Must Die; The Bull from the Sea: Introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) - Hardcover

Renault, Mary

 
9780593535639: The King Must Die; The Bull from the Sea: Introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593535634 ISBN 13: 9780593535639
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A hardcover omnibus edition of the two classic novels in which Mary Renault brilliantly recreated the legendary hero Theseus and his defeat of the Minotaur. CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS.

In her inventive novels of ancient Greece, Mary Renault performs the alchemical feats of fashioning from the myth of Theseus a convincingly flawed hero and of weaving a thrillingly plausible account of the events that inspired the fantastical tale of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. 
 
The King Must Die follows young Theseus from his mystery-shrouded birth and youthful insecurity about his small size, through his growing strength and ingenuity to a dawning belief in his destiny. When teenaged Theseus sets out to join his true father, the King of Athens, he is delayed by unforeseen adventures: first by a perilous forced sojourn in the matriarchal society of Eleusis and next when he volunteers to join the annual tribute of Athenian youths sent to be sacrificed to a bull-worshipping cult on the island of Crete. Once trapped in the labyrinthine palace of King Minos, Theseus enlists the help of the high priestess Ariadne in a daring plan to free the Athenians forever from the dominance of Crete. 
 
The Bull from the Sea begins after Theseus’s triumphal return to Athens, where he finds that his father has died and he is now king. But his confidence in his divinely ordained destiny will be shaken by the adventures yet ahead of him: a life-changing encounter with Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons; the birth of a son who will insist on choosing his own path; and the tragic results of his wife Phaedra’s treachery. Combining her deep understanding of the cultures of the ancient Greek world with inspired speculation, Renault brings the heroes and monsters of legend enthrallingly to life.
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARY RENAULT (1905–1983) was the author of more than a dozen novels. She was born in London, educated at Oxford, and trained as a nurse. After World War II she and her life partner, Julie Mullard, settled in South Africa and traveled widely in Africa and Greece. This was when she began writing her historical novels, including The King Must Die, The Last of the Wine, and The Persian Boy, and a biography of Alexander the Great, The Nature of Alexander.

About the Introducer: DANIEL MENDELSOHN is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His books include the international best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; and An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic. He is the author of the definitive English translation of the Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy and of two collections of essays. He teaches literature at Bard College.

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from the INTRODUCTION by Daniel Mendelsohn

When, in the middle of the 1950s, Mary Renault sat down to
write The King Must Die, her novelistic retelling of the myth of the
Athenian hero Theseus, she was facing a challenge unlike any
other she had previously set herself.
 
Nothing that Renault had done before that decade suggested
that she would become one of the twentieth century’s most
esteemed authors of historical fiction, whose novels of Ancient
Greece, admired for both their scholarly rigor and literary texture,
would sell millions of copies worldwide. Between the late
Thirties and mid-Fifties, the author – who was born in London
in 1905 and emigrated to South Africa after World War II –
had published a number of crisply intelligent contemporary love
stories with trenchant themes, among which the most persistent
was the conflict between individual choice and personal happiness,
on the one hand, and social conventions and historical
circumstances, on the other. This theme was, perhaps, inevitable.
Renault was a lesbian; two of her contemporary novels,
The Friendly Young Ladies, published in 1943, and The Charioteer,
which came out a decade later, treat the subject of homosexuality
explicitly.
 
Despite a lifelong fascination with all phases of the Greek
past – by the time she finished high school she had read all of
Plato, and during her university days at Oxford she repeatedly
visited the Ashmolean to gaze at a statuette of a Minoan bulldancer
– Renault was nearing fifty by the time she decided to set
a novel in Ancient Greece. The inspiration, she later recalled,
came during a boat trip she took along the East African coast in
the early 1950s with her partner, Julie Mullard. She was reading
the Greek historian Xenophon’s memoir of his days as a pupil of
Socrates, and the book sparked her curiosity about the members
of Socrates’ circle and their individual characters. “What must
it have been like?” she remembered wondering. “And I thought
I must write a book about it.”
 
The result of that spur to her imagination was the publication,
A portrait of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, in the latter
part of the 400s BCE, the book, cast as the memoir of an (invented)
student of Socrates, moved easily between grand historical
set pieces and lively recreations of Socrates’ dialogues, the
whole being enlivened by a love story between the narrator and
another young man. (By setting her fictions in Ancient Greece,
a society in which male–male relationships were an accepted
convention, Renault was finally able to write about homosexuality
in a context that required neither excuses nor justifications.)
The novel was an enormous success both critically and commercially;
Renault’s attention to fi ne-grained historical detail won
her the admiration not only of other serious historical novelists
– Patrick O’Brian, the author of the Aubrey–Maturin novels,
dedicated one of them to her – but of classical scholars, too. To
her immense research Renault brought something that most historians
don’t have: a novelist’s imagination and an intuitive feel
for the kind of detail that conveys, more than even the most solid
facts can, the vivid reality of characters and settings. She went as
far as to reproduce, in her prose, the syntax of Classical Greek,
which is heavy with participles. “He, hearing that a youth called
Philon, with whom he was in love, had been taken sick, went at
once to him; meeting, I have been told, not only the slaves but
the boy’s own sister, running the other way.” Such minute attention
to stylistic detail gives the novel the impression of having
been translated from some lost Greek original.
 
For the quarter century following the publication of The Last
of the Wine, Renault produced a steady stream of critically acclaimed
and bestselling fictional evocations of Greek antiquity.
Like The Last of the Wine – and as with the classically-themed
novels of Renault’s contemporaries Marguerite Yourcenar (The
Memoirs of Hadrian) and Robert Graves (I, Claudius), authors to
whom she was often compared – these novels often took the
form of first-person narratives by either real or invented figures,
a technique that efficiently drew modern readers into remote
times and milieus. The Mask of Apollo (1966), told from the point
of view of an Athenian actor who gets mixed up in political intrigues
surrounding Plato between the 380s and the 350s BCE,
gave Renault a vehicle for expressing what her biographer,
David Sweetman, called a “lifelong passion” for the theater;
The Praise Singer (1978), narrated by the sixth-century BCE poet
Simonides of Ceos, is set at the moment when Athens overthrew
her tyrants and established the democracy. Perhaps her best-known
work is a trilogy of novels about Alexander the Great: Fire
from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), and Funeral Games (1981).
The second of these is narrated by a figure who appears at the
margins of ancient biographies of Alexander, a Persian eunuch
who had been the pleasure-boy of the emperor Darius III, and
who, after Alexander’s victory over the Persians, became the
lover of the Macedonian conqueror. By narrating Alexander’s
conquests through the eyes of someone from another culture,
Renault allows us to see this familiar figure afresh.
All that, however, was far in the future when Renault began
The King Must Die. The daunting challenge posed by the new
book was quite different from the one she had faced in writing
The Last of the Wine. In that book, she had had to use her imaginative
skills to put flesh and bones on historical events that
had been recorded and elaborated by a hundred generations
of historians, starting with the classic accounts of Thucydides
and Xenophon, both of whom were eyewitnesses to many of the
events of the Peloponnesian War. With Theseus, she faced, in
a way, the opposite problem: she had to find a way to ground
the fantastical flights of myth so that her legendary character
and his remarkable doings would feel historical – would feel,
somehow, real.
 
For Renault, Theseus, the legendary hero-king of Athens
who freed the city from servitude to its Cretan overlords, was
a natural choice of protagonist. Throughout her life, the author
idolized and identified with boyish adventure heroes with interesting
flaws, an identification that found fullest expression in her
trilogy about Alexander. (She remarked that, while writing the
second volume, she felt that she had become one with her protagonist.)
There was, too, that fascination with the civilization of
Minoan Crete going back to her Oxford days. And Renault had
great feeling as well for the culture of Athens, the ancient city-state
that provided the setting for many of her novels. Theseus,
the Athenian hero par excellence, who famously penetrated the
secrets of the Labyrinth to slay the Minotaur, exemplified the virtues
which that city claimed for itself (bravery, glamor, sympathy
for the oppressed) as well as its vices (a tendency to nudge itself
into others’ business, known as polypragmosyne¯, “busybodiness,”
and a taste for troublemaking). Already in the Iliad, a character
...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593535634
ISBN 13 
9780593535639
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
632
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
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Deutschland

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