Review by New York Times Review
MARY NORRIS'S "GREEK TO ME" IS One of the most satisfying accounts of a great passion that I have ever read. It traces a decadeslong obsession with Greece: its language (both modern and ancient), literature, mythologies, people, places, food and monuments - all with an absorption that never falters and never squanders the reader's attention. Norris is the famous New Yorker copy editor who wrote "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen" a few years ago. That book - a record of her equally passionate relationship with punctuation - gave us a rich example of her noble predilection for knowing everything there is to know about a single subject. If Isaiah Berlin were alive today and able to read "Between You & Me," I am certain he would have considered Norris a perfect candidate for inclusion in the category of hedgehog, his term for a person who works to know one thing completely, as opposed to the fox, who pursues many things superficially. Over a period of nearly 40 years, which has included countless trips to Greece, Norris's experience of the country and all things Greek has remained ever fresh: Very nearly she believes it her destiny. In an oddly brooding way, it's almost as though she thinks Greece has been there from the time she was young to rescue her from herself. When Norris was a baby in Cleveland, a 2-year-old sibling died, and she grew up feeling irrationally guilty about that death. One of her most significant memories is of a college course in Greek mythology that somehow released her from this anxiety, providing her with the wherewithal to leave "girlhood for the life of a woman." This longing for the magic of the ancient world repeated itself years later when, while taking a course in Greek tragedy at Columbia, she became convinced that whatever she read in that class "would put my own troubles in perspective." At the end of her book, Norris visits the famous Dafni Monastery, which contains a particularly great Christ mosaic. If ever there was a moment when her infatuation with Greece and all things Greek seems to climax, this is it. The effect on her of that mosaic was almost miraculous. "My gratitude has made me easier to get along with ever since," she writes. Norris was about 30 when she took her first trip to Greece, came home besotted and lowered herself into the ocean of Greek studies available in New York City: "In the years that followed, I swung back and forth between modern Greek and ancient Greek, cramming modern Greek before a trip, returning to ancient Greek when I got home." At one point she even moved to Astoria, the Greek-American neighborhood in Queens, embedding herself among living Greeks so that every waking hour away from her office she'd be surrounded by either the demotic Greek of the street or the Greek of Thucydides in her armchair. In a small disquisition on the development of written language in ancient Greece, Norris tells us that the Greeks wrote words as run-ons: JUSTI MAGI NETHAT. Spacing was "a great leap forward." As was the invention of Norris's beloved comma, which comes from the Greek word komma, and was invented to further clarify meaning. She also makes the interesting observation that with the advent of social media and online publication we seem to be regressing to those long-ago times by trading in "turnable pages sewn between covers" for scrolling, and by doing away with vowels, "now playfully omitted, as if they took up too much space." She mourns the centuries-long effort at developing punctuation for the sake of ever greater clarity, now being abandoned, day by day, in our benighted contemporary culture. This observation is only a reminder of what we all know; nevertheless, it stunned me. Two loves in particular dominate "Greek to Me": the Acropolis and Homer, both of which Norris returns to so religiously that she often ends a passage about one or the other on a joking note, to avoid, I presume, sinking into sentimentality or self-dramatization. She tells us that one of the things she most loves about Homer is the ancient poet's use of epithets (here meant only as an identifying trait, not a term of contempt). "Gray-eyed Athena" especially appeals to Norris because she herself has gray eyes. The passage ends: "The word that Homer relies on for Athena is glaukopis.... I would gladly step up to the epithet of Athena, but the form for a driver's license does not have a box to check for the eye color 'glaucous.' " The book is structured not as a scholarly guide but as a presentation of the variousness of Norris's Greek experiences held together by stretches of prose devoted, on the one hand, to her memories of early family life in Irish Catholic Cleveland and, on the other, to life on the copy desk at The New Yorker. Collectively, these strands lend the work a tone that suggests girlishness (Norris is 67). She describes her studies with a mentor who was endlessly "indulgent of my desire to learn this immensely complex tongue and one day dance on a table in emulation of Zorba the Greek." This remark could stand as an introduction to the many winking allusions to drinking and flirting (with sailors, guides, waiters) that are sprinkled throughout the book - allusions, I must say, that took me by surprise. Western women traveling to the Mediterranean in search of sensual experience is one of the great clichés I thought we had put behind us. This caveat aside, Norris's irreverent reverence for the history of the Greek language is not only admirable, it is moving. When she writes, "Ancient Greek is like the Bible (from ßißXo
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Comma Queen Norris, author of the best-seller Between You & Me (2016), has done much reflection on her years as a copy editor for the New Yorker. In this memoir, she invites readers to explore the passions she stoked while away from the copy desk, particularly her adulthood dive into the Greek language. As a child, Norris relished learning the alphabet and decoding the words around her. Learning Greek allowed Norris that same enchanting experience of first-time phonics. She was even able to convince the New Yorker that learning Greek was imperative to her success as a copy editor, and the magazine paid for her university classes. Her affair with the language incited a series of trips to the Mediterranean, where she swam in the foaming seas that spawned Aphrodite and practiced her Greek tongue with a myriad of Greek suitors. The book is a delicious intersection of personal essays, etymology, and travel writing. Norris' full Greek immersion pushed her out of her comfort zone and taught her much more than the history of the comma.--Courtney Eathorne Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
New Yorker copy editor Norris (Between You and Me), known for her Comma Queen videos on grammar and style, once again takes readers on an entertaining, erudite, and altogether delightful journey fueled by the love of language. Here, she chronicles her passion for all things Greek, both classical and modern. Denied a chance to study Latin in fifth grade, Morris took that latent enthusiasm for the ancients and applied it to Greek as an adult, even convincing her New Yorker supervisors to subsidize her classical Greek classes as an aid to her copyediting duties. In addition to recounting her scholastic adventures, the book recounts her successive travels through Greece, which she explored with ever-increasing linguistic skill. Morris's lively travel log skillfully meshes autobiographical anecdotes, self-reflection, and explorations of mythology-on her first trip, she gets up early during an overnight ferry ride, hoping "to catch Homer's famed rhododA¡ctylos, the rosy fingers of dawn." At the center of it all is her passion for Greek, a language often "held to be impenetrable," yet which gives her "an erotic thrill, as if every verb and noun had some visceral connection to what it stands for." For those who have long followed the Comma Queen, her latest outing will not disappoint. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her latest work, Comma Queen Norris (Between You and Me) sings an ode to Greece in her quest to experience all things Greek-from the language and culture to the history and people-paying tribute to the gods along the way. Crediting her father for forbidding her to learn Latin as a child, Norris describes the compulsion that led her to study Greek as an adult, funding her passion through her copy editing work at The New Yorker, and testing her skill through travel. Norris's journey starts with language, from A to , detailing the history of written Greek, from the birth of the alphabet to the evolution of spacing. Becoming immersed in the language, Norris consumes every bit of Greek she can get, from singing in a chorus to skinny dipping off a beach in the southern Peloponnese region. VERDICT Norris's experience is one few can match, making this a lively read. However, the author dives deep into the details, which may be distracting for some readers. Overall, this is a good choice for anyone who enjoys travel memoirs.-Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami © Copyright 2019. 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
The New Yorker's acclaimed "Comma Queen" explores her captivation with all things Greek.Norris (Between You Me, 2015), whose first book recounted her career in the New Yorker's copy department, offers an exuberant memoir of her transformation from a sheltered schoolgirl in Ohio to a passionate Hellenophile. Thwarted by her father from learning Latin"Was Dad against education for women? Yes"the author revived her fascination for dead languages after seeing Time Bandits, part of which was set in ancient Greece. Since the New Yorker generously paid tuition for classes that had some bearing on an employee's workas a copy editor, knowing Greek could be helpfulNorris enrolled in modern Greek and ancient Greek courses at NYU, Barnard, and Columbia. The Greek alphabet enthralled her. It was adapted radically, she discovered, from the Phoenician alphabet into "a tool for the preservation of memory, for recording history and making art." Delving into etymology, Norris makes a case for the enduring vitality of Greek by revealing its widespread roots in English. Ancient Greek, she asserts, "is far from dead." As she painstakingly immersed herself in learning the language, the author took her first trip to Greece, where she "shot around the Aegean like a pinball," making brief stops in Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Samos, Chios, and Lesbos. As a solo traveler, she found herself the object of much male attention. "Dining alone in restaurants," she reports, "I was a tourist attraction unto myself." That trip incited her desire to returnshe recounts subsequent journeys in lyrical detailas well as to tackle Greek classics: "I wished there were some way I could be Greek or at least pass as Greek, just by saturating myself in Greekness." She devoured books by Lawrence Durrell and, especially, Patrick Leigh Fermor, two renowned philhellenes, and she steeped herself in heroes, myths, and, gleefully, goddesses. Mythology, she writes, gave her myriad models for women's roles beyond "virgin, bride, and mother," choices that seemed so constricting to her as she grew up.A delightful celebration of a consuming passion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
