Product Description

On the run, in a far-off era of civil strife, Leto gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, survives in a desert stronghold as the lover of its commander, amongst other adventures. Sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages to the treasure hunting of Victorian Europe and then into the present day.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72344 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 408 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Leto, the endlessly fleeing heroine of Marina Warner's new novel The Leto Bundle is the mother of twins born without a navel. She is a minor Greek goddess, or a Christian martyr, or the heroine of a mediaeval romance; she is a castaway ambiguously rescued by a travelling scholar and a refugee caught in the chaos of the Balkans. She is also a bundle of manuscript scraps and jewels and carvings that was for a while mistaken for a mummy--and becomes the obsession of a charismatic young political leader, a fading pop star and a feminist scholar. This is a startling and impressive novel about documentation and identity--Leto is who the documents say she is, just as we all are. Kim, an adopted war orphan, is keen to assert a new Britishness that takes its roots from the here and now, rather than from a history that is itself a product of ideologies. This novel draws together many of the obsessions of Marina Warner's work on fairy-tale; it is a search for lost parents and children and a vehement protest against inhumanity which asserts the role of the poetic in a struggle for human rights that too often relies on reason alone. --Roz Kaveney

Customer Reviews

A Mythological Puzzle
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.

An odd book
I wonder whether I am the first person to try to review this because no one else can think of anything to say either. The synopsis is accurate. The style is approachable and the book is easy to read - perhaps a bit too chatty and like an email (indeed, there are emails as part of the story). I was left however thinking, "so what?" I felt like I missed something. Perhaps the stories changed too often. I'm not sure the attempt to mix the plight of refugees with Greek myth was wholly successful. Nevertheless, I'd recommend this if you're thinking of reading it.