The Song Of Achilles -- A Book Review

"Name one Hero who was happy." 

Humans are all born different, unique and incomparable. Every person is the product of thousands of separate individuals making certain decisions that ended up resulting in the existence of one particular individual, making this phenomenon span years, decades, centuries of Life, of histories, of stories, told and untold, ones that ended up being immortalized in the annals of history told and retold, by village idiots, bards, court poets, and historians; the medium of propagation evolves and matures over the years and the generations and withering leaves and the screams and the whoops and the blood and the milk-and-honey, but humans have a bad habit of surviving mass extinction events and coming back up just great and dandy.

                                  

All these are spontaneous post-book-finish thoughts that haunt me for days and weeks at end when the book i finish has a profound effect on me and imprints such a deep impression on my psyche that I for a momentary period in my unbalanced stormy and expectedly challenging phase of college life am entirely engulfed by the waves of mental satisfaction that the book inspires in me.

The latest addition to this list of mind-pleasing books that I read, is The Song of Achilles.

Madelline Miller has essentially written an Ancient Greek Epic in the light of the Iliad in the contemporary era, and has done such a marvelous job at it that despite these stories being written centuries after they were originally said to be first popularized, they very well go with the olden myths and legends from the Isles of Greece, of the legendary feats performed by the Heroes of Olympus.

You are the physically and mentally ordinary son of a politically lukewarm king of a Greek Kingdom, who has unintentionally murdered the son of a noble family. You get exiled to a far-off kingdom to live as a foster son to a king who is kind to exiles and is known all over as a man who overpowered a deity and had a son with her. There, you encounter someone who embodies everything you were expected to be and everything you could never be. You witness divine inheritance. You try to convince yourself that the existence of this demigod is the cause of your sorrows, and try to hate him to your utmost. Fate has decided else for you, however.

This is a story of personal growth, attachments and inconsiderate love. Of the Fates cruelly and sadistically weaving the threads of fate in such twisted manners that it seemed that the very world seemed bent upon separating lovers apart. Of prophecies predicting the inevitable future in their riddled ways and fooling and bamboozling them who were foolish enough to attempt to manipulate them to their benefit. The ending, to me, was a realistically tragic one, albeit also a bittersweet one, as in the supernatural setting of the entire chronicle, the tragic protagonists were reunited in the ethereal realm. However, in the real world, among the smells of flowerbeds and bloodshed, the swords and ploughshares, the cold prosaic truth remains that the protagonists were a tragic couple, doomed to death because of their love for each other.

I do not fancy reading romance novels. They portray one point of view, one viewpoint in this world of 14 billion people where everyone has different viewpoints to look at Love. I believe that if you read one romance for one couple, all you know is about that particular couple and their story. To know about relationships in entirety, you should "read a romance novel written for all couples who have ever existed", otherwise you shouldn't compare your experiences with someone else's. 

This obviously is a losing game, pragmatically speaking, also knowing that my story will definitely be different, albeit there might be things I would benefit by learning from others' story, I never bothered learning about another love story.

However, this story of a legendary bond that I have heard of many times since my childhood in storybooks, novels, information graphics, films and more, took me by surprise by making me feel like I am reading an entirely different tale entirely, through its unique storytelling style and attention to the details about everything that was normal and abnormal back then in Ancient Greece. 

I have been enriched by the essence of TSOA both in terms of emotional saturation, mystical wonder and historical knowledge.

Blessed is He who is loved by someone as much as Achilles loved Patroclus.