#34 Carlo Gébler on the Power of Greek Myths

11/11/21 • 47 min

Famously, King Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. That's what everyone knows about the Greek myth. But Carlo Gébler sets out to humanise the story.

He talks about his novel I Antigone set in the seventh century BC, and why Antigone is his narrator: because she had "skin in the game" as both daughter and sister to Oedipus.

He says the story remains compelling thousands of years later because it is a family tragedy.

For more on Carlo Gébler's novel:

https://www.newisland.ie/fiction/i-antigone

Presented and produced by Martina Devlin

Famously, King Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. That's what everyone knows about the Greek myth. But Carlo Gébler sets out to humanise the story.

He talks about his novel I Antigone set in the seventh century BC, and why Antigone is his narrator: because she had "skin in the game" as both daughter and sister to Oedipus.

He says the story remains compelling thousands of years later because it is a family tragedy.

For more on Carlo Gébler's novel:

https://www.newisland.ie/fiction/i-antigone

Presented and produced by Martina Devlin

Previous Episode

#33 BIG TOP, BIG DREAMS - SARAH WEBB

A chance meeting with a professor of circus fired children’s writer Sarah Webb’s imagination and led to her latest novel.

Sarah learned how Ireland had the second circus in the world in the late 1700s, with stunt riding, clowns, acrobats - and bee charming, or riding with a necklace of live bees.

Her novel, The Little Bee Charmer of Henrietta Street (for eight to 12-year-olds), was the result. It blends tenement life in 1911 Dublin with circus life.

Presented and produced by Martina Devlin

More on the book here: https://obrien.ie/the-little-bee-charmer-of-henrietta-street

Next Episode

#35 Learwife - Hatching and Hoping

“I had to create her out of nothing,” says JR Thorp of her debut novel Learwife, which explores the untold story of King Lear’s wife, written out of literary history.

The idea first occurred to Thorp at the age of eleven when she read Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger. “There’s a girl in that with a complicated relationship with her parents who says as an offhand line, ‘I wonder why Goneril and Regan were like that? What it was like for them growing up?’ It’s just a thought that’s mentioned and then discarded but it stayed with me.”

It started her thinking about family dynamics, and she read and re-read Shakespeare’s tragedy to see what had created those highly-competitive characters. She found only two fleeting references to Lear’s unnamed wife in the entire play.

“Something about her absence was creating this toxicity,” said Thorp.

More: https://canongate.co.uk/books/3650-learwife/