War story

I MAGINE Alessandro Baricco’s fantasy: If Homer could sing about the siege of Troy in public, why couldn’t he? Then he realized why not: “It would take some forty hours and an extremely patient audience,” the novelist explains in a prefatory note to “An Iliad” (Alfred A. Knopf: 162 pp., $21), his abridgement of Homer’s epic. Read to audiences in Rome and Turin in 2004, Baricco’s version cuts out the feuding immortals and focuses on the battle as seen by its human participants. This first-person approach is more than a mere script, though: Here a series of charged monologues touch on the story’s dramatic highpoints, including Achilles’ rage at Agamemnon (“I care nothing for him, and I despise his gifts”) and Priam’s grief for the slain Hector, which he unleashes on the members of his court (“Get out, all of you vile people. Don’t you have a house of your own where you can go and weep?”). Baricco’s retelling makes one hunger for the original, even as it makes a satisfying meal on its own.

-- Nick Owchar