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Where Three Roads Meet (Myths)

Author: Salley Vickers
Publisher: Canongate Books
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

8 reviews
Sales Rank: 3302

Media: Paperback
Pages: 200
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.8

ISBN: 1847670725
EAN: 9781847670724
ASIN: 1847670725

Publication Date: June 5, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW - ***Delivery usually * 2 - 3 * working days - From Aphrohead of SOUTHPORT, Lancs, uk *** . Priority Airmail used Worldwide on International orders. Thanks from all at Aphrohead.

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - Where Three Roads Meet
•	Hardcover - Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus (Myths)

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Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...

1 out of 5 stars

Dull January 5, 2008
1 out of 7 found this review helpful

This is a dull book. It is about an imagined set of conversations between a dying Sigmund Freud and an Ancient Greek about Oedipus.
Since it is hard to see anything interesting in the world views, thoughts or experiences of any of them, it just became harder and harder work.
The writing is unengaging, and as for 'layers of meaning', I'm sorry but they passed me by completely.
It is not very long, but too long for me. The only good thing is that it occasionally draws attention to birdsong. But that doesn't make it worth reading!

5 out of 5 stars

Made me see ancient story in a new light December 26, 2007
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

I had this for Christmas and read it in one sitting. Everyone believes they know the myth of Oedipus - but apart from the fact that the poor guy bumped off his dad and made it with his mum very few people really know this, or any, myth nowadays. Salley Vickers not only made the story come alive in a very natural and matter of fact way (I like her understated style in this and all her books which allows for a real intensity when she needs it). She helped me understand its power. But also I loved her idea of the story being told to Freud. This is why this is such a good series, though to be honest only Vickers and Atwood have really made the myths work for me, maybe because they are both writers who write from a mythic/poetic perspective anyway.

5 out of 5 stars

a zen masterpeiece November 28, 2007
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

This elegant allusive stylish account of the meeting between the dying Sigmund Freud and the prophet Teiresias is simply the best thing Salley Vickers has done. She just gets better and better. I read a couple of reviews which claimed it was just a rehash of Sophocles - and lacking in emotion. Nonsense. The whole point is the way she cunningly unravels the Sophocles - displaying her amazing erudition on the way with a wonderfully tactful and witty lightness - and casts a whole new light on the myth as well as on Freud. In its economy and wisdom this is a Zen masterpiece.

5 out of 5 stars

Only Vickers could pull this off November 18, 2007
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

WHERE THREE ROADS MEET is a retelling of the Oedipus myth, famous within the world of literaure but also psychology and psychanalysis, thanks to Sigmund Freud who developed the 'Oedipus Complex' to explain early infantile sexuality.
Vickers takes the figure of Freud in his last years, when he is suffering from cancer, as one of the characters within this retelling. Freud is visited by a mysterious man who is blind and comes to him to recount a story about Oedipus. This mysterious visitor claims that he thinks Freud has missed something in his own Oedipus theory, and so he tells the story in order to help the famed psychoanalyst 'see' another point. For Vickers' retelling, the important point about the story is that Oedipus pushed and pushed for the knowledge that would be his downfall, despite being warned that there really are some things that should remain unsaid:
'"Events must be endured if they are to disclose their meaning."
"Or unfold untold meanings? And no one, even you, Doctor, has ever quite accounted for humankind's resistance to letting well alone."' (p173).

What makes this novel truely memorable is that Vickers plays around with language and words - as Freud and his visitor discuss the Oedipus story as well as Freud himself, they muse on the origins of words and how that may relate to the story they are discussing. This results in the book staying with you long after you have finished reading its lines. As any good psychoanalyst should, Vickers is able to make you stop and think and relfect on what has just been said, slowly showing you alternative perspectives or issues to consider.
This is a fantastic read - highly recommneded.

5 out of 5 stars

The seer and the analyst November 15, 2007
7 out of 8 found this review helpful

This book is another volume in that excellent undertaking by Canongate to have ancient myths retold in a contemporary re-imagining. (See my Amazon reviews of Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and Jeanette Winterson's Weight.) Here we have Tiresias, the blind seer of Greek Antiquity, paying several visits to Sigmund Freud in London in 1938 when Freud was in the last stages of his distressing cancer.

Tiresias plays a part in the myth of Oedipus, and in their conversation the meaning of the Oedipus myth, to which Freud had given one particular interpretation, is re-examined.

However, it takes some time for Tiresias to work round to the story of Oedipus. The first half of the book is more concerned with the story of Tiresias himself; how he was apprenticed to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, how occasionally he acted not so much as a translator for the obscure sounds made by the Pythia when the god spoke through her, but found himself a direct vehicle for those revelations; how he was stricken blind by Athene and then left Delphi to become a peripatetic seer. The dialogue in this part of the book is entertaining, though not particularly challenging. Freud is shown as an extreme rationalist, interpreting every myth about the gods as displacements of infantile desire or as the need to rationalize natural injustice, and as rejecting the objective significance of visions. Tiresias is here, I think, a somewhat Jungian figure, for Jung would certainly differ from Freud in taking the truths of myths to be more profound than that; but I do think that the historical Freud had a little more respect for myths than is implied in this dialogue.

The book becomes deeper, I think, from around page 96. It begins, perhaps, with Salley Vickers' closer knowledge of Greek than Freud may have had. (Freud is quoted on p.23 as saying that his Greek `could be better'.) So the club-footed and boastful Oedipus, now the husband of his mother Jocasta, ignored the literal meaning of his name - `swollen [oidi] feet' (duly said by Freud to stand for the tumescent member) for `knowing [oida] foot', because he had been able to solve the feet-related riddle of the Sphinx. Tiresias interprets: `He has to know ... to avert a direr knowledge': the direr knowledge Oedipus had himself had from the oracle, that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother (who, he thought, were the king and queen of Corinth, who had adopted him when the queen had found him abandoned). The high drama of the scene where Oedipus discovers the truth is admirably conveyed in Teresias' telling; and the way Freud matches parts of his theories to the tale Tiresias has to tell is also very well done.

And then Salley Vickers introduces, through Tiresias, something of her own take into the story: Tiresias wonders why Freud had paid so little attention to Jocasta's side of the story: that Jocasta was glad that her husband had been killed since he had been, she thought, the only person who knew of their joint guilt in having tried to kill their son - yet at the same time that she must have known that the man who was now sharing her bed was actually her son. And Tiresias points out to Freud that Oedipus, at least, had not been subject to the Oedipus Complex: he had NOT wanted to kill his father and marry his mother. What drove him was, in the end, his insistence on knowing the terrible truth, which he wrested by threats from Tiresias and others. In the end, he no longer evaded the `direr knowledge' but insisted on learning that also, whatever the cost. Oedipus at the end was a stoic; and so too was Freud in his final suffering: the book portrays him as gentle, friendly, and ever curious. At the very end the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, called Oedipus, and (so Tiresias has it) the blind and crippled king became holy, the original meaning of that word being hale, healthy, whole. Freud would have agreed that that ought to be the ultimate result of self-knowledge.

This is a fine re-telling of the story, and the hard-back edition of the book is beautifully printed and a pleasure to handle.