what's up guys and welcome back to monique if you guys are new here then what is that my name is erica hey how you doing if you're into the history of the ancient greeks and the romans maybe you're just into the mythology and maybe maybe you're just here to hear me talk about greek mythological retelling so that you know which one is worth buying well then this is not only the video for you this is also the channel for you you guys are going to want to hit that subscribe button and the bell icon so
you know every single time posts in the future but on top of today's video and as you can see from the title we're going to be reviewing madeline miller's galatia before i get into the whole video i do want to say i don't know if it's galatea or galatea so if there's a greek person who's watching again i say this in every single video please leave a comment and write out phonetically how i'm supposed to say it but for the time being i'm gonna be picking my poison and i'm picking galatia so i could just
be going through this entire video mispronouncing this but like it's a risk i'm gonna have to take but now that i've gotten that out of the way let's just dive into the review so galatia is like the cutest little thing that i have ever purchased in my entire life i want to start there because this book is just the tiniest like just all around this whole thing it's like the size it's smaller than my head it is about the same size as my head but like oh my goodness it is so cute and it's so
thin which is really nice it's a short story so it's not actually a book it's not even a novella it is just a short story about galatia who's a greek mythological character obviously because i wouldn't be reviewing it if it wasn't but you guys are probably like what the hell is galatia so galatia is a character that plays a role in the myth of pygmalion now the myth of pygmalion i don't know how many of you guys are familiar with it but it's very commonly played on in uh modern movies in modern cinema in modern
theater like a lot of these stories stem from pygmalion as well as like literally the player called pygmalion like obviously that stems from that and it has the same sort of sentiments as the myth so the myth why don't we briefly talk about that that the myth is this guy called pygmalion he is a sculptor and he basically decides this is going to sound so bad he basically decides that he just doesn't like any women that he just doesn't see any of them as being like worth his time i'm paraphrasing massively only because i'm going
to be getting into the myth literally in like a month or two so i don't want to give too much detail so i will be linking it up in in the corners when that video comes out but that's basically what he thinks he's just like nope all these people are like gross there are lots of courtesans where he's from he decides he doesn't want any of it basically and so he's going to carve out of marble his ideal woman so he does this he carves this beautiful woman like she's literally perfect and then he cries
because obviously she's a statue and like he can't actually you know love her and hook up with her and all this stuff it's very strange very problematic and then the gods like venus basically the roman goddess venus because it's written about an ovid she feels so bad for him that she turns galatia which is the statue into a real woman and so they basically live a happily ever after now that myth again i've paraphrased it massively because i'm gonna go into it um later on however that myth is really weird when you read it it's
not like romantic you're not like oh my goodness this guy carved aside your woman it's very much that he decides all women who are created and he doesn't say this but all women who are created outside of men's ideals of women and what a woman should be are not worth his time so he carves his own idea of a woman who exists because of him and he creates this it's very strange like when you actually read the language that's used like in the latin if you choose obvious version um it's it's weird like nobody reads
that myth and goes oh that's so cute no but i will be linking it in the description below if you guys want to read that myth for yourselves i will try and find it in the latin as well as in the english that you guys can find it so check out the description um if you do want to read it before my video detailing the entire myth comes out so you're probably wondering if the book is specifically talking about that uh myth now the thing with the thing with galatia is that it's not actually about
the creation of galatia herself it's actually about more so the aftermath of of that myth so in that myth again as i said they they theoretically like fall in love they even have a kid like all of us again after the statue has become a woman because obviously not in statutory form that would be really weird but anyways so they end up having this child whatever again they live their theoretical happily ever after and what madeline miller has done is she's taken that myth and written the ever-after part and missed out the happily where she's
just like no this is problematic this is a really weird myth and we're not going to sit around and act like it's adorable and act like it's cute and so she wrote how how that myth would have ended um based on the behavior of somebody like pygmalion so yeah for madeline miller it's not a happy ending she wants to call out this double standard she wants to call out this man she wants to call out the treatment of this woman and how other women of that time were looked on as being only desirable if they
were hitting like men's standards and male standards um of that time and galaxy is a perfect example of that so she wrote the ending of the story i don't want to ruin it for you because it's not myth it's actually something that you guys can go and read and see her version of the story so i'm not going to tell you exactly what it's about but it's not happy and it's more so a realistic view of like what that relationship would have been like and how galatia would have been suppressed and oppressed i guess is
a better word um by somebody like pygmalion so in saying that i can't really critique it in regards to mythology because it's it's madeline miller's own version of the aftermath of a myth that we don't have like we don't have that part of the story we just have the and they lived happily ever after so i can't actually critique it and say can you learn from it can you not i would recommend if you want about galatia to read the myth itself and then to read the short story because otherwise the short story really won't
make any sense if you don't know the myth of pygmalion or you haven't listened to i don't know if there's a podcast on it or something and then you won't you won't really get what she's doing with it but i actually really liked it i have to say it's again it's not long it took me like 30 minutes to read the whole thing like just so that you guys can see literally not a lot of text on each page so it really won't take you that long to actually get through and also at the end
what she does which i really like for people who maybe don't know the mythology as well as i do or as well as another classist or something she does add in a little a little like note about where the myth comes from and about what she was playing on and about why she um portrayed it the way that it was which i really appreciated i would sort of summarize madeline miller's version of galatia as a woman who is coming to understand what she needs and what she deserves after being in a very questionable uh position
shall we say that's literally putting it so lightly but yeah she figures it out through that whole scenario what she needs what she deserves and at the end of the story she ends up doing that in order to to free herself of the oppression and of the suppression i'm not really sure which one i'm i'm supposed to use like i don't know that language very well but it's one of those that that she feels in her relationship and in her new life after becoming human wants being carved by statue marble even not statue you can't
say that see i would definitely recommend it and as i just said you should be reading the myth before you buy galatia but i absolutely loved it like i really did like what she did with the myth and i really liked how she played on this myth that wasn't like like the myth itself isn't all that popular and i really appreciate that when people do that and i really love it when people do that because it's shedding light on people that you know the average person might not be super familiar with like even if you're
familiar with pygmalion lots of people don't know that the statue is called galatea um and and that sort of stuff they don't know the surrounding the other parts of that myth aside from pygmalion maybe carved a statue if that so i do really appreciate people doing that and i do really like how she wrote an afterward of the myth rather than rewriting the myth but yeah positive vibes out here on moaning today so thank you guys so much for watching this and i will be linking galatia in the description below because i do recommend that
you guys buy it it's not expensive again it's not a long read and it's perfect now that we're coming up to summer and we're coming to spring and you guys might want to have a short book to bring to the coffee shop like this is the perfect thing to bring it's not heavy it's thin it will only take about 30 minutes to read and it's a it's a good time and it's a good one to read in order to learn about um about mythology in a different way than reading a typical mythological retelling because it's
not a retelling i just said it was a good time but based on this review you guys know what i mean by that that like it's a good time to read it but it's not a happy story anyways with that being said why don't we just close off this video so thank you guys so much for tuning in to this book review i absolutely love galaxy and i hope you guys loved it too if you guys have read it and maybe you have the same views or differing views then leave them in the comments below
because i'd love to chat to you guys about books thank you guys for tuning in and we'll be seeing you next time with more book reviews here on my link i'll see you then [Music] [Music] foreign
