I feel like if you’re already looking on Goodreads for The Iliad, you don’t need me to tell you it’s fantastic. I wasn’t a huge fan of Fagles’s translation of The Odyssey, but here, he knocks it out of the park. We all know the story, but Fagles makes it obvious in his translation why this story is one of the most important pieces of literature to date-- and why it’s still not outdated.
Character is the most important part of fiction for me. You can have all the cool battle scenes and awesome plots, but if the characters aren’t developed, then I probably won’t enjoy it. That wasn’t a problem here. Each major character (and many of the secondary characters) in The Iliad cannot be boiled down to one simple trait. Homer does a great job in humanizing these legendary heroes when he could have only sung their high-praises. They make mistakes, they succumb to their emotions, and they fail; but that’s what makes The Iliad so engrossing. Achilles would not be half as interesting if the only emotion he felt during the book was rage. Even though these characters couldn’t live in
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Metaphors and similes connect acts of war to everyday things, painting pictures that were disturbing and unique each time. The vocabulary wasn’t overly antiquated, which I liked. It’s much easier for me to get lost in the beauty of a text when I don’t have to open my dictionary every page. The repetition of certain phrases shows us aspects of characters without explicitly telling us, provides connections, and increases understanding of events. Even more so, the story is full of dramatic irony. It’s both fun and sad seeing how these characters doom themselves while they have no idea. The prose and tone of the book were perfect and sucked me into the pages. Sometimes, a line or two would be so striking that I had to take a break from reading. And when I finally finished, all I could think was how I wanted to read more because the whole book was