Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: book review

  • Thursday, October 1, 2026 – A History of Crete by Chris Moorey (Reading Note)

    Before the Greeks came, there were the Minoans, with their Linear A, saffron gatherers, bull-leaping boys and girls, and dolphins jumping out of the Aegean Sea. The Minotaur in the Labyrinth was a creature of the island, and the islanders were vibrantly colorful in clothing and facial expression, as seen in the frescoes. The Snake Goddess danced before the klepsydra of civilization’s history, as if her sinewy body uncoiled to birth her children, first in her beloved Crete.

    A History of Crete unfolds the mystery of its people like Ariadne guiding Theseus through the Labyrinth with a ball of thread, allowing us to see the face of the mystical Minotaur: half man and half bull. Rather than producing a stuffy, academically inclined history of Crete, the author organizes each chapter and section chronologically, with Herodotus-like backstories about who the Cretans were, what they did, and how they did it. Crete was Zeus’s home—literally, at least in myth. It was where he was born and where he fathered children in its royal line. Perhaps this home-ground advantage affected Cretan society, whether the god intended it or not.

    One of the most remarkable claims I encountered in the book is that, compared with Sparta, slaves in Crete were not treated as harshly as their counterparts in Sparta. Moreover, the Hermaea festival at Cydonia was a Cretan equivalent of a carnival, in which masters served their slaves and endured their ridicule in a role-reversing psychological drama. Such a custom might have helped the slaves release their emotions and thus prevented them from plotting to subvert the status quo.

    Although I enjoyed reading this book, it was somewhat different from what I had expected; I wanted to know more about the people, such as what they wore, what they ate, how they spoke, and what they did at home or at work. My growing interest somehow stalled as the centuries passed because I wanted to remain in ancient Crete. Call me biased, but I would have been more delighted to read anything about the ancient Minoans than about Crete under its successive conquerors. But then, that is the author’s call, not mine.

    This book is a commanding introduction to more detailed studies of Crete’s mysterious peoples and their lives on the island. And I know that this is what the author wanted it to be. He serves as something of a cicerone, helping readers discover what they did not know. It is also a good coffee-table read to pick up when Netflix has nothing interesting to offer, or simply to dispel boredom.

    No matter where you read this book, you will not close it without a piece of ancient treasure from Crete.

  • Thursday, September 17, 2026 – Reading Book III of the Aeneid by Virgil

    Aeneas is lost. He knows that he has a fate, but he doesn’t know what it is. He tries to find it in his own way, but circumstances do not allow him to do so. Everyone reminds him of his pietas: there are things far more important than life’s simple pleasures. He suffers, complains, misreads. Still, he sails.

    In Book III, we see Aeneas as a leader of his people, a refugee looking for a place where he is fated to land. At first, Aeneas and his father are unsure where their ancestors came from. Then, through the divine intervention that repeatedly directs Aeneas, they come to understand that Italy is the land of their ancestors. Therefore, Aeneas is returning to his ancestral land, which gives him a purpose for the voyage—his fatum, a reason to move away from his personal longings. In terms of logotherapy, such a purposeful voyage becomes a source of meaning in life, requiring him to sail through life’s vicissitudes between Scylla and Charybdis. So, ironically, such a purpose gives him the will to live and to confront the fate that has placed upon him the extraordinary burden of fulfilling pietas. Yet his voyage is never smooth, because fate makes it difficult for him to achieve his divine destiny; the suspense of the voyage makes his sacrifice, born from personal loss, all the more divine and glorious.

    My sense of Aeneas’s agony—that the gods do not favor him, given the hardships he must endure for the greater good—has not changed. In fact, the more I read about him, the more I begin to feel like him. Aeneas holds firm, trying to make his voyage as meaningful as possible. Fata viam invenient. The Fates will find a way. He is a reluctant warrior. He is the embodiment of humanity—imperfect, vulnerable, and beautiful.

  • Saturday Reading Notes on Bitter Water Opera

    September 12, 2026

    My reading today of Sophie Golub’s review of Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera is a literary matryoshka: a reflection on a review of a book I have not yet read. Yet Golub’s elegant summary of the story reveals the book’s undertone: a woman’s admiration for a particular artist. It is a story embedded within a story, conveyed through a reviewer’s reading of a writer’s book.

    The story revolves around a woman named Gia. She is the narrator, who sends unaddressed letters to Marta Becket, an artist whose art and inner life draw Gia into her solar system, which Gia tries to adopt as her own, because Marta is Gia’s kind of artist and person. She is at a point in her life where she needs direction. She needs a clear purpose in life, so she turns to Marta, who has already become a ghost hovering at Gia’s front door. Gia tries to find a reason to live in others’ lives rather than contemplating her own. She needs to see her own reflection in someone or something outside herself. Marta becomes that reflection, though Gia doesn’t realize she may have been chasing her own shadow.

    But I also get Gia’s point about why she favors artists who are dead and out of reach. I read this distance as Gia’s protective shield against the corruption of artists in the real world. In her mind, the familiar image of successful writers is shaped by publicity funded by their publishers and amplified by the media, all too obviously for profit. Likewise, I tend to be drawn to writers who have become ghosts because they are frozen in time; their human faults and imperfections cannot easily interfere with my admiration for their work. Both Gia and I internalize our own artistic principles and judge other artists against those internalized principles.

    I may not have read the review in the way it was intended. But basically, the review centers on Gia’s “existential ennui,” a state in which Gia loses her sense of meaning and desperately needs a model with whom she can identify. I can see something of myself in Gia because we are both interested in people with unique stories. Yet Golub does not allow Marta to remain a flawless model: Marta and her theater also need saving, and Gia’s final transformation is stated more clearly than it is felt.

  • Reading on A Review of the Aeneid, Translated by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, by Deborah Warren

    First, let me confess that I have not yet read the translation of The Aeneid by McGill and Wright. Maybe I will after I finish reading Robert Fagles’s translation. So, while it would be unfair for me to judge which translation better serves readers of the twenty-first century, I can say that Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s epic narrative of Aeneas reads like a prose poem to me, simply because its language and arrangement suit my taste.

    This essay is not for general readers but for readers with an academic background in Latin. Therefore, for general readers such as myself, its comparison of the original Latin with the English translations—in terms of metrical structures, the choice of words, and their juxtaposition—may not ring a bell. My interest in reading The Aeneid comes from a purely personal curiosity: I want to understand why Aeneas is the way he is, breaking the hearts of the women who loved him dearly. In that regard, Fagles’s translation chimes the bell of my heart and soul because his words are poetic and, at the same time, go straight to the heart. Take a look at these translations:

    Fagles:

    “Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate,
    he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,
    destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil.”

    Robert Fitzgerald:

    “I sing of warfare and a man at war.
    From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
    He came to Italy by destiny
    To our Lavinian shores,
    A fugitive, this captain . . .”

    McGill and Wright:

    “I sing of arms and of a man displaced
    by Fate, the first to leave the coast of Troy
    for Italy and its Lavinian shores.”

    Fagles’s version of “Wars and a man I sing . . .” clearly expresses Virgil’s intention to sing about a man destined to put duty before feeling. By placing the mainstay of The Aeneid—the fate of the man—at the beginning, Fagles conveys to his readers that Aeneas was not born to be a romantic figure, or even a heroic star, but to be a man torn between what he wants and what he must do.

    Through Fagles, we hear Virgil sing of Aeneas, a demigod and an excellent soldier: the embodiment of the Roman ideal, whose pietas and gravitas signify personal virtue as well as martial prowess. But Virgil was not a soldier; he was a poet. Bernard Knox, however—the classicist who wrote the introduction to Fagles’s translation—brings the crack of a horsewhip to it. A former U.S. Army captain and World War II veteran, Knox had literally followed in the footsteps of Antony and Octavian during the Italian campaign. He must have carried Euterpe and Calliope with him—the Muses who had also stood behind Virgil thousands of moons before.

  • The Aeneid — Book I Reading Note

    Version 1.0.0

    Book I begins in the middle of Aeneas’s journey to his fated destination of Italy. Virgil seems to sympathize with the man who surrenders his personal feelings to the public duty of building a new Troy, as arranged by the Fates. Gods can interfere but cannot change his fate. It’s a case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—but who is Zarathustra here? Aeneas, or Virgil speaking through him?

    If it’s Aeneas who speaks, then he does so through Virgil as his advocate for the glory of fulfilling pietas with gravitas. Cupid is not for him, but for Dido, who became enamored with a man whose vulnerability was braided with virility, clothed in beauty. Then Juno’s absurdly violent rage against the Trojan general, who laments his fate, forces him to wander across the seas through the vicissitudes of gain and loss, loss and gain. But that doesn’t mean Aeneas is a man of steel, because when Venus appears to him in disguise as a wanderer, he rebukes her for behaving like an immortal rather than a mother, even when she is trying to help her son.

    Book I presents Aeneas as a man who agonizes over the conflict between his desire and pietas, born of a mortal father and an immortal mother. It is the dual nature of man: physical and spiritual. This could later be applied to the Christian teaching that the will is strong, but the flesh is weak. In Virgil’s view—his imagination still cloaked in the Republican toga, albeit under Emperor Augustus—Aeneas was the model Roman man and soldier who placed honor and valor before beauty and love. He was Virgil’s kind of man, one who would build the grandeur of Rome.

    Book I ends with a scene in which Dido, the queen of Carthage—Juno’s beloved land—is infatuated with Aeneas after Cupid sprinkles powdered amour upon her. This is Venus’s machination to secure protection and refuge for Aeneas and the Trojans. Would this be a plot of Fate too? Then, does it mean that Venus is also a gambit in Fate’s chess? Then, what is the meaning of living a life in the mirage of hope?

  • Thursday, August 27, 2026 – Entering the Virgilian lottery (Reading Day)

    I am reading The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles. Today I set off for Italy as a ghost to find the faults of the man who was irresistible to women and to examine his fate: everything seems to exist to fulfill his destiny—to found a city that would one day lead to Rome, whose influence would last for thousands of years. But then I see the image of him carrying his old father on his back, with his young son Ascanius at his side and his wife Creusa behind him as they flee burning Troy. That is why I have always wanted to know more about him. Is he really an egoist or a victim of fate?

    But first, I needed to know about the whys and wherefores of the man, Troy, and Italy. Reading the introduction was necessary. This was unusual for me because I usually skip introductions and read the book with a tabula rasa in order to form my own understanding of its content. Not the Aeneid. Not Virgil. Not Robert Fagles. For me, The Aeneid, Virgil, and Robert Fagles form a trinity. The epic has survived for two millennia. A second trinity shaped Aeneas’s identity—pietas (duty), gravitas (seriousness and moral weight), and auctoritas (authority earned through public service). It is even tattooed into his very identity as pius Aeneas—“pious Aeneas.” This is not solely religious but also conveys a sense of duty toward values deemed admirable and essential to being an admirable Roman man and soldier.

    Knox told readers his own story about why the Sortes Virgilianae and Virgil’s work entranced him. He was also destined to become a reader and a soldier of Virgil, both literally and figuratively. As a U.S. Army captain during the Second World War, he and the Italian partisans marched through regions of Italy once crossed by the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony. King Charles I was no exception to the Virgilian way: during the civil war, he read Virgil and tried to discover his destiny by playing the Virgilian lottery. This involved picking a passage from The Aeneid at random and interpreting it in light of his own situation—a literary equivalent of bibliomancy. It was regarded not merely as superstition but as a guide to what might happen and what one should do. Of course Knox did it too.

    Now that I am finally aboard the ship with Aeneas as I begin Book I, I want to decide whether to try the Virgilian lottery and join the king and the captain. But first, I want to see whether Aeneas deserves my accusation that he is a heartless man who, under the aegis of his sacred pietas, makes the women who loved him—his wife Creusa and Dido—face their fates.