hope | (no subject)

so. i finished the persian boy. i'm not sure if i enjoyed it or not. it certainly was fascinating, and a well-wrought read. but god, bagoas got on my nerves. the same way jane eyre got on my nerves, i think. just that ultimate servility drives me insane. i mean, i understand that the whole thing with both bagoas and jane eyre is that it's the love that drives them to forsake any other desire... that love is enough to sustain them without respect or equality or anything else, but yeah. that's not something that i admire.

i do admire the way renault was able to have so much repetition without it getting tiresome. alexander has a battle, alexander is wounded, bagoas is worried, alexander gets better. but by the last 5th of the book i was liek "isn't alexander DEAD yet?" not that i didn't like alexander - i thought he was the bloody star of the thing - but, and i say this with an understanding that it was written from the outset as a retrospective, i got sick of bagoas reflecting on events leading up to his death, *as* events leading up to his death. blah. the abrupt ending didn't help.

has anyone read the prequel to the persian boy? or any of mary renault's other books? are they any good? as i started reading i was of the mind that if it wasn't about The Gay, there probably wouldn't be enough else in it to keep me interested. but i don't know... like i said, it was entertaining writing, and alexander was great. teh gay was a bonus.

and, because i know a bunch of you on my flist love this book, i made a bunch of icons.

i wanted to caption them but wasn't sure what to put on them, so if you'd like me to caption any, just let me know and i'll do it for you. i know what i want the text to look like and everything, i just didn't know what to say, heh.

now i shall go off to read some fic. anyone have any recs?

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maryrenaultfics == and from there you can probably get more...

*sobs*

She doesn't love Bagoas ...

*sobs some more*

:-D

Try The Charioteer. I'm only halfway through but it's wonderful.

Have also read the prequel to PB, Fire from Heaven. It's lovely -- doesn't pack the emotional punch for me because I adore Bagoas and I love first person POV, but it's all about Alexander's upbringing and is wonderful. Alexander is very vivid, just as he is in PB.

Read Fire From Heaven, it's gotttt the gayyyyy too. With Hephaistion and Alexander, except Renault's style is so oblique I had to read a paragraph over about five times to figure out if they actually did it or not. did IT, i mean.

pseudonihilist has great Alexander/Hephaistion stories, with a side of Bagaos. You can find them on her public journal

pseudy.

arysteia also writes Alexander/Hephaistion, though the only one I can remember is Philalexandria (http://www.livejournal.com/users/arysteia/3162.html). (Okay, it's sort of a Smallville crossover type thing, but you can ignore that if you want).

If you are into getting down and dirty after reading Fire from Heaven, I have major thoughts about Hephaistion/Alexander/Bagaos and the whole power inequality triangle of angsty-lovin'.

i just read the praise singer, which is about the life of simonides. there's no gay (or Gay) in that, but i really enjoyed it. maybe that's partly 'cause i'm a classicist and therefore i'm, like, morally obliged to enjoy historical novels, but it would definitely have been worth reading anyway.

I'm sorry to be jumping in here so late, hope (assuming you even get notification that I did, which is probably not likely nowadays). I am a Bagoas whore, but had to actually comment because of your mention of Jane Eyre.

I've read a feminist interpretation that removes Jane from victimhood and points out what a very angry woman she is. She never stops being that girl who resents injustice and was able to defy authority in the form of her aunt. She just operates more covertly as a mature adult. And she doesn't go off with St. John, who offers her friendship without love, nor does she go back to Rochester until he's been sufficiently reduced in circumstances by fate for her to be the strong one -- the one who sees for him, is his right hand since his has been lopped, etc. (And I won't even get into the idea of the mad wife acting as Jane's subconscious, punishing him the way the angry Jane truly wishes.)

Anyway, I'm rambling here. The point I wanted to make is that you can view Bagoas as more manipulative than he's willing to portray himself, though he gives away hints of how tricky and clever he can be about getting his own way. And I can see that without it taking away from the fact that he does love Alexander, too, by imagining him thinking his dear sweet king just doesn't understand what he truly needs, etc. Because Bagoas does view Alexander as kind of an innocent, compared to his experiences with people.

Just my two cents in the hope of getting you to feel the Bagoas-lurve.