Gilgamesh

What a bright sunny day it is today.

Set predominately in Australia starting from the end of WWI to the end of WWII, this is a book that is probably one of the best in a long time for me. Gilgamesh is about Edith, a girl of British/Russian heritage who grows up on a farm with a complete lack of knowledge regarding anything beyond where she lives. She barely even knows about her family back in England. Her father had passed away a year ago, her mother has become a recluse from fear of the outside, and her sister is responsible and serious to a point of rudeness. [Spoilers] One day out of the blue, Edith’s cousin Leopold and his friend Aram arrive and stay with the family for what feels like a few months. During their stay they help provide for them and bring entertainment. Through their stories of travel and excavating the Middle East, Edith develops her own longing and dreams of traveling and visiting unknown places as well. When Leopold and Aram take off on their next adventure together, Edith is grows bored of her surroundings, and discovers she is pregnant. Upon her son’s birth, she decides to go seek out Aram and possibly Leopold.

What got me right away was the prose style of writing; Gilgamesh was very beautifully written. You understood what Edith was going through, all of her struggles as she pushed onward. Not just Edith though, you saw that with all of the characters. You see a lot of internal workings with everyone, from Edith’s sister to the people she stays with in Armenia. A lot of it is having to do with the era that this takes place. It is another book set in WWII, and yet that is not the focus; Edith’s family was struggling well before the war, and only toward the end of the book does Edith begin to overcome.

With this style of writing, do we see a heroine who is realistic, gritty, and a lot of the times stubborn. From reading reviews from others, there is a tremendous amount of praise for Edith and her character development and her persistence to see things through to the end, because how else will she know the answers to her questions unless she seeks those answers. There is also a sad point that I just thought of. Being that the book is called Gilgamesh, there are an incredible amount of references to the epic Gilgamesh. I found a different literary correlation. Edith reminds me of The Great Gatsby and the idea of the green light. That life described and told by Leopold and Aram becomes her “Daisy”, so to speak. She is very well on her way to that green light, she is able to get on the ship and go to England and Armenia, but because of life circumstances and opposition, Edith comes to the end of the road, and realizes that the only place she has left to go is back to the farm in Australia. She does not die as Gatsby did, but she may as well have. It is a life thing, I think. Some people realize they are at the end and stop, some people do not. Edith ended that time in her life and went into a new one, but she lived her life wishing that she did not stop that time.

The other character that struck me the most was Jim; he is born and lives such a tumultuous life of non-solidified identity. By the time Edith and him return to Australia, he is still a small child and yet has lived through a lifetime of challenges. Throughout the remainder of the book, he struggles deeply with longing to be back in that world of challenges and meeting people who are happy to have him around. This is what separates Jim from Edith though as characters, where Edith regrettably ends that season of travel and Jim finally wills himself to go out and see the world for himself. Jim is all good intentions. From the moment he is born he sees the broken world around him and responds by being helpful, or no response at all as everything shifts from welcoming to unwelcoming toward him. He forms the resolution that has become a mindset nowadays: if the environment and the people in it are not kind, I will leave to find my own. I love that sense of maturity and world knowledge from his travels that Jim has; I get the feeling that he might have had small feelings of isolation, but the overall knowledge that he is not alone in the world and there are genuinely kind people out there spurred on his determination to go on his own is something we all need to hear and see and know.

I appreciate that this is a unique story of growing up compared to a lot of suburban stories you see. It does not happen often where a growing up story is one where the character goes out into the world and sees beauty in something so ugly as war. It was the search for the people who were the best company in your life and along the way you found that it was the tenacious adventure of it that brought the thrills.

Gilgamesh is a book I am keeping. I would definitely read it again, and I think because of the length I can feel confident in being able to read it again. I do not know if I will be able to read the epic Gilgamesh, but I would perhaps get a good sense of what it is about as well. If you are interested in reading Gilgamesh, you will find it here.

10/10