The Leto Bundle
A novel, Chatto & Windus, 2001.
Farrar Straus Giroux (US) 2002
Vintage (paperback) UK, Simon & Schuster (hardback) US

Leto, a picaresque heroine of our times, spans time and space: she has twins, lives for a time with wolves, stows away on a ship loaded with plundered antiquities, and works in a hotel in the war-torn city of Tirzah. Eventually, she reaches the present day and becomes a servant in the household of Gramercy Poule, a rock star.

Drawing on mythology, fairytale, medieval chronicles and contemporary events, The Leto Bundle explores the trials and struggles of a refugee, it examines issues of identity and exclusion, motherhood and survival.

long-listed for the Booker Prize, 2002

'The Leto Bundle is a... portrayal of a woman who, through all her desperate incarnations, remains a recognizable and sympathetic figure, not just a pathetic symbol of the dispossessed. Leto's sojourn as a menial hotel worker in contemporary Tirzah is extremely powerful. Less successful are the assorted plotlines woven through the modern sections of the story, especially those involving a self-absorbed folk singer named Gramercy Poule.'
Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post

'An extraordinary novel...Breathtaking in its scope and ambition...An enthralling read.'
Sunday Express

'A rewarding, incisive and topical novel.'
The Times

'A compelling and erudite meditation on exiles, refugees, loss and the search for a home. A timely, ambitious and inventive novel, which blends a reflection on Europe’s past and present traumas with rare story-telling verve.'
Scotland On Sunday

'Warner brilliantly communicates the kaleidoscope of cultures, tribes and nationalities encountered by Leto on her epic journey. Driven by a mystery that keeps the reader guessing to the final pages, The Leto Bundle has the verve and immediacy of an e-mail...Beautifully written, the language rich and sensuous, with a seductive range of references...Tremendous fun.'
Literary Review

‘The Leto Bundle is a novel as ambitious and thrilling as Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits in its weaving of the past and the present, intuition and academia, fact and fantasy.'

Susan Salter Reynolds
Los Angeles Times

‘Warner’s deft command of her material - and her ability to create fully believable characters - manages to both question and applaud the power of myth in modern society, and readers will be entranced with the magical pull of this well-told tale.'

Publishers Weekly

'This novel, with its huge and vigorous plot, takes a gamble from the start. Leto is not pegged down to normal human existence. She's a shape- shifter, living outside space and time, and sometimes Warner struggles to reconcile Leto's mystery and her ordinary, pignant humanity. But the novel holds its course, deliberately digressive, although never indecisive.

'There will always be a Leto. Like Mother Courage, she gathers herself together and moves on through the landscape of this rewarding, incisive and topical novel.'

HELEN DUNMORE The Times

'Warner weaves the grotesque, the satirical and the openly risible into a lyrical and passionate framework. She pushes eclecticism to the point of exuberance and then mischievously punctures the illusion with a well-time reference to Barney the Dinasaur. Yet for all its high humour, this is a dark novel.'

RUTH SCURR Times Literary Supplement

'The Leto Bundle is not an historical novel in any conventional sense. By jettisoning the constraints of time and place, and setting part of the novel in late- twentieth-century Albion, an imaginary country that bears a close resemblance to Britain, Warner stresses the continuities between past and present, whilst emphasising the timelessness of her themes.

'Driven by a mystery that keeps the reader guessing to the final pages, The Leto Bundle has the verve and immediacy of an e-mail. At the same time, it is beautifully written, the language rich and sensuous, with a seductive range of references

'The novel is also tremendous fun, with a well-drawn cast of characters that includes the zany singer Gramercy Poule, her rabbit-loving partner, and resilient Phoebe, Artemis in modern dress.'

The Literary Review

‘Marina Warner's expansive and entertaining explorations of folklore, sexuality, storytelling and pop culture have given her bestseller status in the somewhat rarefied world of cultural historians, along with writers such as Carlo Ginzburg, Angela Carter, Camille Paglia and Bruno Bettelheim. Warner's best-known works -- From the Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman, Alone of All Her Sex -- are feminist exegeses of fairy tales, popular and classical myths, and religious icons, couched in a lyrical prose that makes genre-defying leaps among topics as disparate as Hesiod's Theogeny, the brutally hilarious excesses of Struwwelpeter, Nintendo games and The Odyssey.

‘But Warner is also a very fine fiction writer, with five novels to her credit. Her newest, The Leto Bundle, blends classical scholarship with more recent history -- the ongoing misery of the Bosnian conflict -- to create a powerful contemporary myth of refugees, statelessness and the most primal legend of all, that of the Divine Mother and her children.

‘Most contemporary fabulists plunder the Greek pantheon for its heroic or picaresque values. With The Leto Bundle, Marina Warner has taken on a more challenging task, that of reinvigorating a lesser-known myth and making it both her own and timeless.

‘In the classical tale, the Titan Leto coupled with Zeus, who promised to protect her and her twin children when they were born. Dismayed by his wife's wrath when she discovered his infidelity, Zeus abandoned his pregnant lover. Fearful of Hera's revenge, even the very earth rejected her.

‘Poor Leto -- who is about 14 in Warner's retelling -- is driven from one place to the next. She finally finds sanctuary on the desolate isle of Delos, where her twins, Apollo and Artemis, are born. A wolf, herself a mother, is the only creature who aids the hapless little family as they are beaten and driven out of hiding by those who hate the very sight of powerless outsiders with no man to protect them.

‘Thousands of years later, Leto's story is rediscovered by a museum curator, Hortense Fernly, "the deputy keeper of Classical Antiquities at the National Museum of Albion." Fernly is in charge of an ancient bit of flotsam recently put on display: "Cartonnage, gilded and painted, high relief, glass eyes and braided wig. Mummified body inside wrapped in coffering style of weave. Linen, papyrus, horsehair, glass, human remains. Found in sarcophagus . . . lid with scene of Bacchic frenzy? Nativity scene."

‘Within days of its appearance in the museum, this bundle of oddments begins to draw attention, not just from serious museum goers or curatorial staff but from the less desirable human flotsam -- homeless people, students and schoolchildren, assorted eccentrics -- who also make museums their homes, especially on rainy afternoons. It is these folks who start leaving notes and offerings to the mummified figure later known as Leto. One of them, an idealistic schoolteacher named Kim McQuy, becomes increasingly obsessed with the archaeological remains. Kim has visions of Leto talking to him; he wants to incorporate her into his Web site, History Starts With Us, as a symbol of the refugee's plight in modern Europe.

‘Kim begins corresponding with Dr. Fernly, who arranges for him to read the translations of the papyrus scrolls found with the Leto bundle. The scrolls, and the journal kept by their 19th-century plunderer, tell tales that intersect across time and place, from ancient Greece through the 12th century and into the Victorian era. Yet all the stories feature the same central character, known variously as Laetitia, Lettice, Nellie -- a very young unmarried woman with twin children, a boy and a girl, all three gaunt and near starvation, all three forever seeking refuge, forever cast back into a maelstrom of unceasing violence between religious and ethnic factions that continues down through the centuries.

‘Warner's depiction of the childish Leto is heartbreaking. Uneducated, still bound by filaments of desire and affection for the men who use and then abandon her, Leto feeds and comforts her children as a wild thing does, nursing them until they're 5 or 6 years old, seeking always to find a better life for them, though without hope for one herself. Only a small miracle concerning the twins gives them any standing at all: Neither possesses a navel; this symbolizes their divine origin.

‘When Leto's wanderings bring her to Tirzah, a place very like present-day Bosnia, the story takes on even more ominous overtones, for Leto and for Kim McQuy. Because Kim himself is a displaced person: As a toddler in Tirzah, he was sold by his mother to a middle-class English couple. The adult Kim has almost no memory of his mother, now called Ella or Ellie; but she has not forgotten him, and neither has Kim's twin sister, Phoebe. Years later Ella and Phoebe make their way to England (called Albion by Warner), where their lives and Kim's once more intersect.

‘The Leto Bundle is strongest in this portrayal of a woman who, through all her desperate incarnations, remains a recognizable and sympathetic figure, not just a pathetic symbol of the dispossessed. Leto's sojourn as a menial hotel worker in contemporary Tirzah is extremely powerful. Less successful are the assorted plotlines woven through the modern sections of the story, especially those involving a self-absorbed folk singer named Gramercy Poule.

‘Marina Warner understands that myths, unlike movies or novels, never truly come to an end. And so in its closing pages The Leto Bundle circles back upon itself. Its haunting final image, that of a homeless woman wandering alone across 21st-century Europe, is redeemed by the small hope generated by the fragile web of human contacts Leto/Ella has left behind in Albion. Perhaps, this time, someone will come after her, and she will at last find a home.‘
Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post

‘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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.‘

Synopsis

A story full of myth, mystery and great imaginative power about a young woman who, searching for her lost baby son like Mother Courage, appears in different guises across different centuries and cultures. She is the eternal refugee but ultimately, the survivor.

extract

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0099284650/reviews/026-0151170-2422846

click for review in French.

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