Rarely a book has a writing coming so perfectly in places, where there is a right word to describe anything, in exactly the way in which it happens (using the verb to squirrel, for instance, to describe a restless movement that could have been described in hundred other ways).
Using the Homeric motive of The Harpy, Megan Hunter is an anatomy of revenge, in the vein of the old Greek tragedies and the transgression of daily life into mythical shapes is fascinating. According to the legend, the harpy used to be a creature half-human (woman) half-bird, a symbol of unleashed genuine destructive energy. This background saves the book from being just another story of a stay-at-home mother who abandoned her promising professional career whose husband cheated on her.
Since Lucy, a thirty something middle class woman, suddenly receives a message from the husband of the woman the father of her children was having an affair, she started planning a careful physical revenge against her husband. He accepts the challenge of 3 revenges, unleashing the evil energy that we, as humans, may invest in damaging each other. She was affected psychologically and spiritually, but she will leave her traces on him in the most visible, physical way. The Harpy is awake...
The focus on the revenge - planning, unfolding, causes (predictably, a broken childhood in a family realm marked by violence) - may feel suffocating sometimes, but the story stops short from becoming nauseating. Every moments is perfectly crafted that I felt the need to read a sentence more than once, for spotting all the information and recreating the scenes once again at least once.
The Harpy has a unique take on a familiar, way too frequent recent literary topic. It demonstrates, among others, that extraordinary writing can save any single topic from boredom and common place.
Rating: 4.5 stars
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