Return to Speculation

[whataliethatwas.livejournal.com]

I was going to wait until after the TaT reread for this, but the previous post got me thinking about this so I'm go to go ahead anyway.  With another year to prepare now, why not return to our regularly scheduled programming of speculation?

Working my way through past reread discussions recently, the POV progression has seemed more noticeably deliberate. Each book has moved further from first-person Eugenides and broadened in scope. It occurs to me that the books together could read a bit like a historical volume – a collated collection of contemporary works all relating to the life and history of a political figure (a la “The Life and Time of Eugenides the Great”). You’ve got the first-person origin story (TT), an overview possibly drawn from contemporary writings and possibly summarized from journal entries, etc. (QoA), and a couple stories from contemporaries (KoA, CoK, TaT) with a broader view of the political arena of the time and major historical events (the first year of the reign of Attolis, Sounisian civil war and becoming an Attolian tributary, the loss of a Medean slave and some political instability after and so on). I don’t think the final book will be written like a history textbook, but I could see some kind of foreword/closing note by the historian in question (maybe the Tykus Namikus of the map or even MWT herself). I could even see it being compiled by Kamet in a historian capacity like Tacitus or Pliny (who did write a natural history and died in the Vesuvian eruption, btw), especially as two of the books are about Costis and himself.

I feel like the addition of a world map bears this out a little, as well as some comments I’ve seen floating around from Megan about the map.  Am I crazy?