The Atlantic Monthly, April 2005
"[These essays] remain the twentieth century's most beloved, tortured, and profound responses to the world's greatest and most disturbing poem."
Book Description
Simone Weil's essay on Homer is one of the uncompromising mystic moralist's most famous and powerful works — a reading of Homer which is also a nightmare vision of war as a machine in which all humanity is lost. Since it first appeared in 1939, it has served as a manifesto of pacifism. Rachel Bespaloff's recently rediscovered essay on Homer was written in the midst of World War II, partly in response to Weil. Bespaloff's account of Homer beautifully illuminates the complexities of his characters, with a focus on the existential drama of choice and a difficult awareness that at times, war is the only option. Bespaloff's essay is here presented for the first time together with Weil's, as it was originally meant to be. These two works offer a provocative demonstration of the link between great literature, philosophy, and human life and death.
War and the Iliad FROM THE PUBLISHER
Simone Weil's "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" is one of her most celebrated works - an analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost. First published on the eve of war in 1939, the essay has often been read as a pacifist manifesto. Rachel Bespaloff was a French contemporary of Weil's whose work similarly explored the complex relations between literature, religion, and philosophy. She composed her own distinctive discussion of the Iliad in the midst of World War II. Bespaloff's account of the Iliad brings out Homer's novelistic approach to character and the existential drama of his characters' choices; it is marked, too, by a tragic awareness of how the Iliad speaks to times and places where there is no hope apart from war. This edition brings together these two influential essays for the first time.
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