What a bizarre, bizarre book, which showed up in a list of the best books of 2024 from Slate . I copy here the blurb that made go “eh?”
This debut from Irish novelist Ferdia Lennon tells an inspired story of two hapless pals, underemployed potters in Syracuse, Sicily, 412 B.C., who truly cannot believe they just defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War. Now there are all these miserable Athenians imprisoned in a quarry outside town, and what are two lovers of Greek theater supposed to do but sneak in and ask the prisoners if any of them knows the plays of Euripides? Told in a contemporary Irish brogue, dense with classical detail, this novel should absolutely not work, but instead it turns into the funniest, most surprising, and most sneakily moving novel I read all year.
What a specific book, I have to say. It makes you feel so smart for knowing the references that fly, fast and furious, throughout, although mostly over the heads of our narrator Lampos, the less Euripides-obsessed of the two potters. In reality, he’s just found an attachment to Paches, one of the Athenian POWs, who has such brilliant green eyes that he must be Jason.
The tone swings supremely wildly. Lampos is blithely unconcerned with such trivialities like watching men starve to death, free will and the lack thereof for the enslaved women (and, in particular, the woman he falls in love with). He’s not even that enamored of Euripides and doing the play, except that it gives him a bit of forward momentum in a life that’s been a bit lackadaisical. Living with his mother, spending his meagre coin getting drunk off of subpar wine, jeered for not fighting against the Athenians but pitied for the club foot which prevented him from doing so. He makes utterly infuriating choices time and time again, but somehow you feel empathy for him regardless and keep hoping that there’ll be a happy ending for this small troupe of ‘actors.’
The whole thing reads, as the blurb notes, like a contemporary “urban” or “realistic” Irish novel, with lots of “ma’s” and those specific run-on, observational sentences that bring to mind Joyce brought forward a few hundred years. But it’s also undeniably a Greek myth of sorts, a blend of tragedy and farce but with the beats coming exactly where you don’t expect them. And sue me, I was rooting for these two dudes and their theatre kid dreams! Wasn’t expecting a gut punch, though.