The Laughter of Aphrodite : A Novel about Sappho of Lesbos / Peter Green.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Green, Peter, 1808-1902, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women poets--Fiction.

Women poets.

Biographical fiction.

English fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (292 p.) : 1 frontisp., 1 plate

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley ; Los Angeles, California : University of California Press, Ltd., [1993]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Best-selling classicist Peter Green recreates the life and times of the Greek lyric poet Sappho in this beautifully conceived, sharply detailed work of historical imagination. We meet Sappho at the age of fifty, when she is shaken by her fatal and final love affair with Phaon. She narrates her own story from the vantage point of self-questioning middle age, and her candid meditations make intimate, engrossing reading. Only fragments of Sappho's poetry survive. In imagining Sappho's life Green found his task "rather like that of an archaeologist reassembling some amphora from hundreds of shards--of which more than half are missing." Yet, in his synthesis of historical evidence and ebullient invention, Green produces a seamless, moving, and persuasive portrait. He recreates Sappho's life by interweaving her surviving poetry into the narrative, not as quotations, but as her own imagined speeches and thoughts. Sappho's life spanned one of the most exciting periods in Greek history. Green's novel, full of details about daily life on ancient Lesbos, draws the reader into the political and social climate of her world: the civil strife accompanying the transition from aristocracy to mercantilism, the household relations between slave and aristocrat, the details of sea travel in the Aegean. Green wrote the novel while living on Lesbos, and his graceful rendering of the landscape, the rhythms of the seasons, and the varied flora of Sappho's island pervades the narrative. Sappho's poetry reveals a direct, spontaneous woman who eschewed artifice and embellishment. Green's extraordinary talent captures those qualities and brings this woman of unflinching honesty very much to life.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

ON SAPPHO

GENEALOGICAL TABLE

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF EVENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780520917156

0520917154

OCLC:

1149440597