Friday open thread: retellings

[dolorosa_12]

Welcome to the end of another working week! I'm kind of shattered, and am looking forward to a weekend with no social obligations, and lots of cooking.

This week's open thread prompt is in response to a rather disappointing book, which happened to be a retelling of a work of classic literature (I'll say more about it later when I do my Sunday post wrapping up the week's reading). I gave it a 3-star rating, and on reflection feel that that's being overly generous. There are a couple of reasons why it failed as a retelling, and many more why it failed as a work of fiction in general, but in any case, it got me thinking about retellings, and what makes them work or not.

Therefore, the prompt is: tell me about a retelling that succeeded for you — and why — or tell me about a retelling that failed for you, and why.

I'm specifically interested in retellings rather than adaptations. There can be a shift in medium (the book I'm talking about is a retelling of a stage play), but it needs to do more than just make a broadly identical new version of an older work. If it helps: Clueless is a retelling of Emma, whereas Mamma Mia! the film is an adaptation of the Mamma Mia! musical.

Comments

[lyr]

I love re-tellings (and write them myself), so there's too many to name. But here are the first three that jump to mind:

I found Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls, a re-telling of The Illiad from Briseis' POV, very effective. It is the first of a trilogy that follows the survivors back to Greece. It is horrifying and shattering in real, human ways; it is a tragedy of a level that the original cannot reach. But it also carries a resigned survival and fortitude, as the women who endured the "heroic" fates of the men around them must have had to do. I was hooked from this part on:
“As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

And I don't know if you know the 14th-century Chinese classic Water Margin, but S.L. Huang's The Water Outlaws transforms it into a gender-bent, queer, stirring call to revolution against corruption and exploitation by the wealthy and powerful. It's a LOT of fun, and it succeeds for me especially because it co-opts the mission of the original from xenophobic nation-building to inclusive revolution.

Speaking of such transformations, that's also what I like about Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country and Destroyer of Worlds. I really like the feel of Lovecraftian mythos, but the original text is so infused with H. P. Lovecraft's racial and ethnic prejudices. Ruff flips that around when he centers characters of color and tells those stories from their point of view. I love the way that also allows the creeping cosmic horror to tangle up with the banal horror of racism in America to make new points about what evil and resistance to it really mean.

[gingicat]

Completely agreed on The Silence of the Girls.

[dolorosa_12]

The Silence of the Girls is one of my favourite books ever, not just my favourite Iliad retelling or my favourite retelling! And that specific quote — which was like a punch to the heart the first time I read it — is a good summary of why. It is the Briseis-centric Iliad retelling that I'd been searching for all my life, as I said in my review. (There's been a sequel published — The Women of Troy — which is good as well, but doesn't quite reach the excellence of the first book.)

I've not read the Chinese original, nor The Water Outlaws, but it sounds impressive.

I've seen the TV adaptation of Lovecraft Country, which has some really powerful moments (the first episode has exactly the quality that you describe in the book), but it's let down by some questionable writing choices which I'm not sure are in the source material, or are inventions of the TV scriptwriters. The books sound like an extremely powerful reclamation.

[lyr]

The show Lovecraft Country departed from the book a LOT, especially after the first few episodes. I still mostly enjoyed it, but it was a very different animal.