The Leto Bundle

This is very typically a Marina Warner book that is obviously clever that has amazing reviews and I was truly looking forward to reading it. However, I didn't find it at all satisfying and was frequently confused which may, of course, be my problem! Having read her 'From the Beast to The Blonde' as one of the suggested books from an MA, I realise the author's skill but cannot say I found The Leto Bundle a good read.

We read this in our book group. I struggled through the whole thing (unlike many of my friends) and I thought it was dreadful. It was that awful mix of pretentious subject matter combined with two-dimenional characters. I cared so little about them, that I was completely unmoved by their experiences. I understand that some of Marina Warner's books are better than this, but I would not recommend this one. And if you don't believe me, it contains what could be the worst metaphor ever written: "she was as lost as a contact lense in a mixed salad".

Marina Warner takes us into the heart of the experience of displacement through violence, war, colonial appropriation, rape, ethnic/religious conflict. Reading this in the week after the Paris attacks and the British government's decision to bomb Syria, this is a timely exploration of the way violent imposition of power and retaliation along religious/ethnic lines necessarily diminishes human life to a pattern of repeated hollowing out, rupture, destruction, invisibility and death. The archetypal patterns that Warner traces should be a warning to all those politicians who vote to close borders and demonise the dispossessed.

This was a used item that arrived in good time and was in fairly good condition. It was also a reasonable price for a hardback book.

Marina Warner's The Leto Bundle is nothing if not ambitious in its chronological scale, stretching from 400BC to the 1990s. The novel concerns a collection of artefacts found with a mummy, that talk of the life and wandering of a mysterious woman known as Leto.Housed in the Museum of Albiom, the mummy begins to draw around it a ragtag group of followers of "various nationalities" first noticed by the dedicated cleaners who must dispose of the "tideline[s] of hair of flakes of skin... [the] mortal rime of leavings". One of the group is eccentric school teacher Kim McQuy, who "hears" Leto talking to him and is determined to uncover her "truth" as part of an online public campaign to restore the Leto Bundle to a more appropriately high-profile setting. The straight-laced Museum Curator Hortense Fernly is his sceptical source of information, and the two communicate largely through emails. Mellowing wild-child folk/pop singer Gramercy Poule, who notices Kim virtually plagiarising her lyrics on his website, is also slowly pulled in. Pulled into what?Pulled into the wider story, the greater context, the uncontrollable vortex that represents the destiny of the woman, Leto: whose life the novel pieces together through fragments of translated documents and chance encounters. Leto is born firmly in the realm of classical mythology, raped by a God and bearing twins, but as the story progresses she transcends time and reality, in what ultimately becomes the search for her lost son. Although, Warner seems to have grander schemes, and Leto becomes the Patron Saint of the dispossessed, the homeless, the immigrant, the exile; her life physically embodying the emotional and spiritual wrenches of refugees throughout the ages.It's a winding, puzzling story that does involve the reader (along with the characters) slowly making sense of the information revealed. However, the novel at times seems overly complex, or perhaps it is just this reader who is uninformed. I was confused by the sense of place, and couldn't visualise anything other than a vague backdrop against which events unfold. There are no recognisable modern names, though surely the places are London, Britain and America. I don't quite understand why "places" are thus obscured, unless Warner intends her readers to be similarly displaced?Overall, The Leto Bundle is bold in scope, thought-provoking in content, and written with delicate prose, but is definitely for those who like their novels intricate, and their authors erudite.