I have been very taken by this story in the latest New Yorker about the Minotaur:
I'm ashamed to admit it, but I rarely read the fiction in the New Yorker. I'd like to say that the reason is that Kelli is always stealing them and hiding them on her bedside table, but the real reason is that I'm just too lazy to spend the time to get into them. Pretty much I just read the movie reviews, the theatre reviews, the Shouts and Murmurs, and look at the comics. It's sad.
But this story really sucked me in. That's partially because I'm still the geeky classics major, and I just have a weakness for classical mythology; but it's got a glimmering poetry to it - with a limpid clarity like a fluorescent bulb burning in a misty back street dive somewhere. It's got an ache, too - which I think is my favorite thing about art - how it examines those hungers you just can't satisfy...
I thought it mixed a number of fascinating things together--the Minotaur as a kind of elemental force, metaphor, 8-bit games, theology, urban infrastructure. I imagined the Minotaur as a homeless guy, and that alone could take the story in a new direction. However, O'Connor takes a relaxed attitude towards internal coherence: why is he the Minotaur, if he's not in Crete and bull-headed? How do centuries pass with no sense of change? Is the entire world really enclosed in a labyrinth or is he just assuming it? The story is grounded in modern-day detail but at the same time throws realism out the window.
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