3 best Robert Graves books

Following the reading of the book The sixteen trees of the Somme, Larss Mytting I evoked the participation of the great Robert Graves in the battle that took place in that French region of the Somme, where more than a million soldiers died and in which Graves himself was about to leave this world without having written so many great novels.

Destiny is like that, it can mark you, but it cannot destroy you if you have a pending mission (or so we would like to think in that chaotic plan of our existence as a civilization)

And precisely of that, of civilizations knew and wrote a lot the good of Robert Graves. Overcome the trauma of his participation in World War I and after turning to literature as a possible cure for barbarism, this author found great reasons in ancient civilizations to write historical novels of great significance.

The most remote history moves between mythology and remote written testimonies that try to fit together like a puzzle with a certain meaning.

Then comes literature, magically fitting all those pieces together, participating with the imagination and documentation of specific scenes of supposed intrahistories adjusted to the unveiled customs and customs of those nights of the times.

Undoubtedly a very necessary author to understand what our most remote ancestors felt and thought about a planet that was still unknown in its operation and gigantic in its space.

Top 3 best Robert Graves novels

The white goddess

In this great novel the author left a large part of his mark, his intention to live within his own story, with that result of credibility of magic as the ultimate mechanism of everything.

And at the same time it points to a disruptive thinking about the beliefs of the first Western History, the one that was born in Greece by means of thinkers and pristine scientists. Graves presents us in this novel a role of women quite different from the current one. Before the figure of the mythological gods and their religious descendants took the figure of man as the representative of almost every deity, woman could be considered that being to be worshiped.

A kind of matriarchy surely focused on the ability to generate life. What Graves tells us in this novel opens a new perspective on a world that began as a true matriarchy, probably until Eva became the human capable of contravening God ...

The white goddess

I, Claudio

Graves invites us to think that we have in our hands an autobiography of Claudio. Pretentious proposal that does not seem so much when the vast knowledge of an author is discovered who seems to have found that autobiography in some remote Roman ruin.

And, to be fair, Claudio should have written it all down, not only the official aspects but all kinds of ins and outs of power as well as the vices that every advanced society boasts as soon as it is constituted.

Through this supposed testimony of Claudio we also enter the previous times of Caligula or the particular parallel life of Claudio's third wife, the disturbing Messalina. Altogether a fascinating fresh story about imperial Rome, with the tone of a confessional biography where we get closer to everything that revolved around power ...

I, Claudio

The Golden Fleece

Robert Graves gave us a new perspective on Greek mythology in this novel. His extensive knowledge of stories and characters from those days allowed him to rewrite the old myth of the Golden Fleece through which Jason and the Argonauts set out on their journey to conquer and with it the recovery of the throne of Thessaly in the hands of Jason.

In this rewriting we also get closer to many other huge characters of that overwhelming fantasy that is Greek mythology with overtones of universality. We accompanied Hercules, Orpheus, Castor and crossed the Black Sea.

We enjoy that idiosyncrasy of the early Greeks, the same that would forge what the West is today. Adventures and approach to our origins, a very interesting work to approach Greek mythology from a new, more complete prism that mixes the human, the divine and the space of the demigods or heroes.

The Golden Fleece
5/5 - (8 votes)

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