Robert Graves' Mythologies
lareviewofbooks.org"I, Claudius" was one of the most amusing and interesting books I've read.
One of the greatest audiobooks, too. Narrated by Derek Jacobi, so you know it’s top-notch.
Absolutely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzLuG3tM84I Interview from 1965.
Graves’s translation of The Twelve Caesars was a formative work in my teenage years and (along with Das Glasperlenspiel) defined my view of humanity for some considerable time and still rings true many decades hence.
His "Goodbye to All That" is a good memoir of the First World War. Though his Mythologies are the most readable or engaging one. I prefer Thomas Bullfinch for Mythology.
I meant aren't the most readable
This is quite a cantankerous view of Graves.
How so? Please expand.
They sum up as follows: "Aside from a few devotees of the White Goddess, no one rates Graves as a prophet these days, but his books, some of them at least, are too good to be left “lying about.” The best of them should be picked up and read. We should be grateful that it’s easier than ever to rediscover Graves and grant his work the attention it deserves."
Is hard to take this last paragraph seriously when most of what the reviewer has said up to that point sounds grumpy and reluctant:
“...risking his reputation on cranky ideas, for revising masterpieces and making them worse, for alienating friends and abandoning family.”
“...self-destructive impulses led Graves to think he could safely inhabit a household comprising himself, his wife Nancy, his lover Laura Riding, his wife’s lover Geoffrey Taylor, and several children. Their “quadrilateral” ended poorly, with Graves hurling himself from a third-story window in pursuit and imitation of Riding, who had just thrown herself from the fourth floor.”
“Perhaps he expected that someone, someday would do for him what he had once done for the Roman emperor Claudius...”
“...a few on the esoteric and occult fringes still agree with him.”
“... Graves, never humble, characterized the “inspiration” that descended upon him...”
“Can we read Graves without looking to the moon?”
“When writing fiction, he almost invariably constructs so sturdy a framework of fact, theory, conjecture, and supposition that the conventional pleasures of fiction are elided.”
“Perhaps Nausicaa is Graves’s self-portrait as ruthless artist.”
“Graves is a great accumulator of incidental detail and memorable anecdotes but, as ever, he’s an indifferent analyst of character.”
“Dozens of Graves’s books have little hope of emerging from the lead casket of obscurity.”