Dubravka Ugre?i?'s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is the latest, most inventive and most substantial volume in Canongate's series of revisioned myths. The first was Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, a harsh retelling in Penelope's voice of the concluding scenes of the Odyssey. With her own special bite, Atwood singles out for dramatic treatment the girls who worked in the palace and fraternised with Penelope's suitors; she reminds us how pitilessly Odysseus orders them to be hanged, every one. The resonances with contemporary matters, which this series of books aims to stir, are powerful in this new handmaid's tale. Karen Armstrong opened the series with an introduction that stressed myth's archaic origins and links to religion and ritual, to national or tribal identity. This is the ontological version of myth, which assumes that the stories connect to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture's history and ethics.

LRB 27 August 2009 | PDF Download