Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece (Vintage Departures)

• Paperback - 02 September, 1997 - Vintage
• Usually ships in 24 hours
• By: Patricia Storace
• ISBN: 0679744789

Buy this book from Amazon.com

List Price: $15.00
Amazon.com Price: $9.75
You Save: $5.25

About this book

For many, Greece is a land lost in time. It conjures up images of the looming Parthenon with its pillars of marble and the timeless whitewashed buildings of its parched islands glinting against a backdrop of the crystal blue Mediterranean. But ask about contemporary Greece and most people draw a blank. In Dinner with Persephone, poet Patricia Storace does a compelling job of filling in this empty canvas. She conjures a country where history and modernity coexist in often surprising ways, and with the past as an ineluctable backdrop, Storace paints in the everyday details that bring the country and its people vividly to life.

Other books you may find interesting

• Facing Athens: Encounters with the Modern City
• A House in Corfu: A Family's Sojourn in Greece
• Travelers' Tales Greece: True Stories
• Colossus of Maroussi
• Greece: A Traveler's Literary Companion
• The Summer of My Greek Taverna: A Memoir
• Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens
• The Greeks
• A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum)
• The Bellstone: The Greek Sponge Divers of the Aegean: One American's Journey Home
• Fodor's Athens: The Collected Traveler
• A Guide to Biblical Sites in Greece and Turkey
• A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos
• Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens
• The Hills of Tuscany
• North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through a Family's Extraordinary Past

Reviews by readers

Greece warts and all

Storace, a Greek speaking writer goes to Athens to work for a year. She visits various islands and tourst sites describing these in interesting detail. Storace also recounts her personal contacts with oversolicitous men who make it very clear that women are meant to get married and stay home. Women are objects for men and infrequently taken seriously. The writer has ambiguous feelings about the Greeks. She does make lots of friends, but doesn't seem anxious to go back.

Living Mythology

This book is an interesting juxtaposition of travelogue and mythology. As a child, Storace was fascinated with the stories and characters of Greek mythology. This led to a life-long fascination with Greece and Greeks, not only of the ancient culture, but as they are today. In this book, Storace takes us on a journey to her Greece, a land that is inseparable from its mythic past. She narrates to us stories of people she met in Greece, repeating the stories they told her, all the while relating the stories to the ancient tales from Greek mythology. As a travel journal, the book is a little heavy on allusions and symbolism and a little light on realistic imagery. But direct descriptions of events is not what this book is about-instead it is the personal story of how Storace finds meaning in Greek culture through her own integration of history, mythology and observation of contemporary society.

hate it! hate it! hate it!

In the spirit of fairness I have attempted to read this book twice now and have put it down with a sick feeling in my gut. It's the same feeling I get whenever I find myself in the company of someone extraordinarily pretentious and self-absorbed. I just wanted to read something intersesting about Greece. Instead, this book tells me a lot more about the peculiar psychology of the author more than anything else. I hate knowing I wasted my money of this drivel. I've yet to find a better example of mental mastrubation in my Amazon purchases.

Top of page