By Margaret Atwood. Knopf Canada, 199 pp, $25, hardcover.

Once upon a time, there was a man who dared dream of a project so vast, so ambitious and mythic and smart, that he knew he could never reach his goal unaided. So this man, this Jamie Byng of Cannongate Books, sent emissaries to distant lands where lived women and men both brave and true. He asked that they give succour to his project of telling the stories of old once more, of setting the ancient songs to new tunes by the best of the living bards. His emissaries were duly received and bade welcome in the proper fashion, and Jamie Byng found fealty and friendship on all the shores.

Louise Dennys, publisher of Knopf Canada, pledged her troth (as did 30 more; see www.themyths.ca/). She fetched her brightest singer, who was Margaret Atwood, and with diverse blandishments and oaths did she set her to retell the life of Odysseus, the one who sailed for Troy and finally set the war there to rest with the ruse of a wooden horse. But grey-eyed Atwood would tell not of his glorious exploits in war, though, nor of his 10 years' wandering the seas, fighting the displeasure of the sea god Poseidon to make his way back to Ithaca and home.

No. Atwood would weave a different tale.

The Penelopiad makes a well-worn story bright again, new-polished and glinting. It tells of Odysseus, the man "who could undo any complicated knot, though sometimes by tying a more complicated one" and of "plain-Jane Penelope" who waited patiently for 20 years while her husband killed Trojans, slayed monsters, bedded goddesses; it tells of her loneliness and her schemes when a hundred suitors descended to take Odysseus' place; it tells of the dozen maids Homer informs us were killed on Odysseus' eventual return.

Art makes the familiar strange and Atwood does that brilliantly here. Art speaks of itself yet, like a black hole, contains densities of meaning that can at first be only intuited. Read The Penelopiad. Now reread it. Art makes ugliness beautiful, deadliness mesmerizing, the unreal real. "You don't have to think of us as real girls," the maids reassure us, "real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money."