An Iliad (2006)

Alessandro Baricco (Silk) draws attention to his title — this is ''an Iliad,'' an Italian's prose translation of Homer's siege-of-Troy saga, re-translated into English (by Ann Goldstein). Furthermore, he divides the tale into a series of monologues by characters both major and minor. The result is compelling, occasionally thrilling: Odysseus declaring ''We ran among the corpses and the abandoned weapons and the black blood everywhere, until we came to the camp of the Thracians'' certainly gets one's blood pumping. But it's also distancing. By reducing The Iliad to a sequence of what amount to talking-head speeches, the great narrative lacks flow.