Read vs Listen: Circe

Roughly fifty Greek names, several of them one phoneme apart, several of them arriving in the same third of the book.

Confidence 70%, which puts it in the leaning band. Bands run from close call at 50 to 64, through leaning at 65 to 79 and clear at 80 to 94, up to clear cut at 95 and above.

What this book actually is

Twenty-seven chapters, linear and continuous, told in the first person by Circe from her own birth onwards. There is no framing device, no second narrator, no dated chapter headings and no flashback structure. What complicates the simple shape is that the narrator is immortal: the span runs to centuries, and decades can pass inside a single paragraph or between two chapters with no calendar marker at all. Elapsed time is signalled only by phrasing, such as generations of mortals arriving and dying.

The demand the book makes is a naming one. The author's own cast of characters page lists fifty-one figures. LitCharts counts forty-seven. SparkNotes reduces the list to twenty, of whom four get in-depth treatment. So a reader holds roughly forty-five to fifty names, of which perhaps a dozen to fifteen are load bearing, plus places including Aiaia, Colchis, Knossos, Crete and Ithaca.

The case for reading it

Several of the names are near homophones, and they do not arrive politely spaced out. Perse and Perses are a mother and a brother one phoneme apart. Pasiphae, Phaethousa and Lampetia are a sister and half sisters with overlapping stems. Eurylochos and Eurycleia share five opening letters and are different people. Telemachus and Telegonus is the hardest pair, because they are both male, both tied to Odysseus and both central to the same third of the book. On the page these are visibly distinct words, and the diacritics tell you which vowels are sounded separately. None of that survives being spoken.

The second argument is the prose, which reviewers repeatedly describe as lyrical, built on simile drawn from natural imagery, and which people slow down for.

The case for listening to it

The recording is the most decorated on this site. Perdita Weeks took the 2019 Indies Choice Audiobook of the Year, voted by independent booksellers out of six juried finalists, and it also holds an AudioFile Earphones Award, a Booklist Editors' Choice and a place on Paste's best audiobooks of the year. Booklist's starred review credits her with raising the retelling to new heights. Structurally it suits audio too: one first-person voice, no second narrator, no jumping timeline and nothing typographic to lose. And on the names, audio gives something print does not, which is a settled pronunciation delivered consistently by one person, including the one readers actively argue about. The recording says Sir-see.

The audiobook in detail

Hachette Audio released it in the US on 10 April 2018 at 12 hours 8 minutes, and Audible Studios for Bloomsbury followed in the UK on 19 April at 12 hours 9 minutes, about 8 hours 5 minutes at one and a half times speed. Perdita Weeks, a Welsh actress, reads both. It is one narrator, unabridged, with no cast and no second voice. AudioFile describes her cool British intonations as capturing the character's evolution, and Paste says the performance makes the forced interiority a vibrant thing. Worth knowing whichever format you pick: the author publishes a full cast of characters and a reader's guide free on her own website, outside the book, so a listener can keep the reference open too.

Who should ignore this verdict

Anyone who already knows the myths, because the name load is only a problem when the names are new, and this is the closest verdict on the site. Anyone who wants one voice to sit inside for twelve hours, which is what this book is and what this performance was decorated for. And anyone reading in a second language, where hearing the sentences alongside seeing them is a genuine help.

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