Richard Oh

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

So says Shakespeare. And the world would be a better place for all of us if we only heeded the old Bard’s words. What is swirling in the vortex of today’s conflicts can be traced back to this one meaningless term: identity. In the name of identity, the Israelis are waging wars against the Palestines. In the name of identity, Christians are pitted against the Muslims, the liberals against the conservatives, women against men. Americans against the rest of the world. There is no sign any of this is letting up any time soon.

What is identity, really? Why does it trouble the world so? On the surface, it’s a label attached to a person since birth. The label then becomes a badge of honor that constitutes a person’s proud heritage, unity within a group or organization. This label is inescapable. Amartya Sen in his book Identity & Violence describes how we are mindlessly drawn into this penumbra of identity and just as mindlessly, almost in a sort of an illusion, consider it our destiny. He strongly rejects the mindlessness of our association with any group or creed.
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An Iliad
By Alessandro Barrico
Vintage
158

Alessandro Barrico, of the fame of Silk, had an idea. He thought it was a neat idea to read Homer’s Iliad to a paying audience in Rome. He soon found out that the length and the archaic language and the structure of the original classic tale would be too tiresome to modern public. He came up with a clever solution. He cut out passages, all those Greek paeans, invocations, and lengthy descriptions that hindered the progress of a spanking good read. Then, he went on and did something really daring: he made the major and some minor characters in the tale recount from their perspectives the battles between the Achaens and the Trojans, caused by the abduction of Helen of Argos by Paris. The battles lasted more than a decade until Odysseus came out with the brilliant idea of theTrojan horse to end the war. As it turned, Barrico’s idea worked, judging from the people who packed the readings, and later through the public broadcasting system to enthralled listeners.

This book, An Iliad, is the result of that successful experiment. But how successful it is in book form? I imagine that while reading this tale the reader or readers must have added plenty of flourish to each of the character, but reading it through in a book I found it rather hard to distinguish Hector from Achilles. In Barrico’s abbreviated version, the characters come off rather crisp and clean-cut. The tale of Achilles’s eventual participation in the battle because the death of Patroclus, his cherished friend, looms so large as a plot it somehow blots out the necessity of characterization. As it is, it reads like a modern day thriller, spearheading toward the culmination of the events, the battle between Hector and Achilles. Without the vexing digressions and cumbersome distractions of Homer’s paeans and invocations, An Iliad is truly an engrossing book. One could almost get through it without any trouble in one sitting.
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