Metamorphica

Zachary Mason, 1974-

Book - 2018

In the tradition of his bestselling debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason's Metamorphica transforms Ovid's epic poem of endless transformation. It reimagines the stories of Narcissus, Pygmalion and Galatea, Midas and Atalanta, and strings them together like the stars in constellations--even Ovid becomes a story. It's as though the ancient mythologies had been rewritten by Borges or Calvino; Metamorphica is an archipelago in which to linger for a while; it reflects a little light from the morning of the world.

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Subjects
Genres
Adaptations
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Zachary Mason, 1974- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xi, 282 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9780374208646
  • Aphrodite
  • Athena
  • Zeus
  • Nemesis
  • Dionysos
  • Apollo
  • Death
  • Aphrodite, continued.
Review by New York Times Review

WE ARE LIVING in an age of great cultural interest in ancient myths, including TV dramas ("Troy: Fall of a City"), literary retellings (Neil Gaiman's compelling "Norse Mythology"), novels that reinvent myth in a modern context (Kamila Shamsie's brilliant "Home Fire") and novels set in the classical past (Madeline Miller's moving "Circe"). In times of sweeping change, myths provide a way of thinking about big questions like transformation, power, agency and responsibility, and these ancient stories have the great advantage, in a polarized, partisan age, of being ecumenical : They belong to none of us, and to us all. For Zachary Mason, a computer scientist as well as the author of three works of fiction, ancient myth is an opportunity to explore the emptiness of life and the infinite variety of narrative. His last book, "The Lost Books of the Odyssey," was a sequence of cleverly Borgesian short stories that imagined variations within the framework of the Homeric poem. The title of his new work, "Metamorphica," nods to Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and Ovid bookends the collection. In the first story Ovid begs to trade "anything, everything" for literary immortality. The final piece returns to Ovid, now in exile on the Black Sea, writing a letter to Emperor Augustus to plead for a repeal of his sentence. The letter gets soiled, slashed, mildewed and translated into multiple languages, until the "false and worthless letters are as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert." None reach within even a thousand miles of Rome, where, in any case, the emperor would probably not open them. The piece is a fable about bad postal service and the difficulties of communicating before email and video chat. But it also offers one of many variations on Mason's central theme: Where we may expect to find meaning, there is none. The lesson can feel profound or sophomoric, depending on how much patience you have for this kind of thing. Mason takes the memorable female characters of classical myth - goddesses, prophets, rape victims, noble heroines, killers of family members, witches, Amazons, adulteresses and athletes - and turns them into ciphers. He reduces the number of rapes; Persephone, Daphne and Thetis, for example, are willing participants in their liaisons. But he also reduces female agency to more or less nothing. Helen is a phantom, alienated from her own story. Daphne is not an emblem of poetic inspiration, but "an ordinarily pretty girl," replicated throughout eternity as an endless sequence of equally ordinary pretty girls. Eurydice, the beloved of Orpheus, is "less a lover than a trope of literature." Clytemnestra's triumphant slaughter of her daughter-killing husband "fades into nothing." Athena, a terrifying military goddess, becomes a needy girl with a crush on Odysseus. Mason's male characters live almost equally meaningless lives, although they have a somewhat wider set of interests and exercise their own power through poetry, close male friendships and (always heterosexual) sex. As in Ovid, Zeus is a serial rapist, and Mason provides disturbingly lyrical descriptions of his abusive pleasure ("her will dissolves like a sandbank in the tide"). But even rape fails to give Zeus' life meaning. When another version of Athena robs and challenges him, he manages only to substitute one kind of frustration for another. Mason's twist on the story of Midas reminds us that money has no fixed meaning or value. Midas becomes the inventor of money, "a necessary myth for our time": After the loss of his friend, Dionysos, he melts down his family's treasures into coinage, and in so doing, erases history and memory. In the ancient version of the myth, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne's great retelling, "The Golden Touch," there is an insistence that some things - like eating and drinking, and the people we love - might be incommensurate with money. Mason eliminates this thread, along with more or less every element in the body of Greco-Roman myth that smacks of ethics, or suggests that anything we do matters. Death is a common theme, and death is usually not scary but void. When Zeus takes the islands, and Poseidon the seas around them, Death plays the winning card: He claims "the emptiness within them." Elysium, the place of bliss provided for warriors after death, becomes an infinite series of rock pools in which Menelaus, husband of Helen, can collect and catalog mollusks with only a vague "intuition for an order" that might one day emerge; the work shields him from the pain of death and from his wife, who has "never been kind." The Greek myths, in Mason's hands, are like those mollusks: a vast set of items to collect and catalog, offering glimpses of a pattern, and a bleakly comforting escape from the world of feelings and human beings.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

In his debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010), Mason, a computer scientist, reimagined The Odyssey; in this follow-up, he once again offers variations on classical myths. Inspired by and expanding upon Ovid's Metamorphoses, Mason uses the classical names given to constellations to structure brief explorations of numerous Greek and Roman figures, such as Minos, Theseus, Odysseus, Atalanta, and Apollo. Like the ancient texts he is inspired by, Mason humanizes each figure, whether godly or mortal, often using a first-person perspective to inhabit their personal struggles and relationships with other characters. Although he does orient the reader with a brief introduction to each character, some familiarity with these myths is helpful, particularly in order to appreciate his changes. A fractured, multilayered text reminiscent of Alan Lightman's classic Einstein's Dreams (1992) and similar to Madeline Miller's similarly themed Song of Achilles (2012), Mason's novel is written in beautiful prose that almost reads like blank verse. Mason once again displays his ability to transform classical creations into a tale that is distinctly his own.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Mason (Void Star) reworks Greek myths into mostly melancholic fragments in this impressive collection of flash fictions that accentuate the pain, frustrations, and regrets of well-known and unfamiliar myths. Each section centers loosely on a single god, showing the ways they debilitated successive family lines and interconnected figures. Athena's stories float around the edges of The Odyssey, capturing the bleak aftermath of the abandonment of Calypso and revenge of Ajax. The Zeus cycle follows Europa's lineage, including Minos's section-a heartbreaking look at his belated anguish for mistreating his friend Daedalus. In the sections for Philemon and Baucis and Daphne, Mason rejects the characters' traditional transformations into trees to show deeper rewards and punishments. The strongest story of the Nemesis portion has a Clytemnestra bursting with her rage at the sacrifice of her daughter. Alcestis's section strips away the romance of a wife willing to die in place of her husband, Admetus. Mason mashes Gilgamesh and Theseus together and makes Atalanta a haughty lesbian. It's heavy but never plodding; readers familiar with Greek mythology will appreciate Mason's mournful riffs highlighting the darker recesses of mythology. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Written in narrative fragments, with robust imagination and deft language, -Mason's acclaimed debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, attempted to unhinge the story of Odysseus from its historically dominated Homeric version. Here, the author reimagines the epic poem Metamorphoses, reconstructing the stories of Orpheus, -Persephone, Phaedra, and the rest of the characters in Ovid's magnum opus through his own literary lens. Using constellations as a framing device, Mason writes each account as its own self-contained myth, but in aggregation the stories form imaginary lines that constitute a pattern. The emerging model underscores Ovid's central thesis, the necessity and pain of transformation from identity to form. This thought is echoed in Midas's rumination that gold has no history, only endless transformation into ships and cities. VERDICT Classicists and readers familiar with the Metamorphoses will luxuriate in Mason's imagination and beautiful language, while those unfamiliar with Mason or Ovid might find this novel of narrative fragments an unreadable work of experimental literary conceit. [See Prepub Alert, 1/22/18.]-Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., -Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A computer scientist who earned literary renown with The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010), Mason shows that his novelistic debut was a warm-up for an even more ambitious reimagining of an epic work.Where Odysseus unifies the earlier work (both in Homer and in Mason), Ovid's Metamorphoses and, necessarily, Mason's latest are more sprawling, introducing readers to the likes of Icarus, Midas, Orpheus, and Eurydice, many of whom narrate their own stories, with Mason adding the Roman author himself to the cast of characters. Ovid ends the book exiled from his homeland, his stories in shards, as "some trace their ancestry to the original, but all, by now, are corrupt, little more than florilegia of ghost stories, quotations out of context, fragments of geography. Through the incessant operation of chance some few have come to resemble their original, but there's no way to find them." Amid the loop of time and space, where years pass as waves and centuries are but an eye's blink, the only constant is change, as the title implies. Mason takes his opening epigram from Ovid"Everything changes, nothing ends"but later puts those words into the mouth of Dionysos in the dream of his friend Midas, who has transformed the world by introducing money. "I found that money had made the world as mutable as water," he muses. Within this literary world, the likes of Narcissus and Helen of Troy have interior lives, previously unexplored motives, and doubts, though as the cycle of myth proceeds toward its conclusion, the one thing that has never changed is Death, presented here as a friend or lover to some, an enemy to most others, but the fate for all. Amid the shape-shifting throughout this work, there's an immutable quality. "Faces are drawn in water, and names written in dust," according to the renewed mythos. "Even persons are ephemeralin the end, there's only pattern."Both soaring and deep, this dazzling narrative creates a fictional universe of myth that transcends time itself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.