When writers want to think about war, they turn to the “Iliad.” Two of the most renowned studies of Homer, by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, respectively, were written by French Jews struggling with pacifism during World War II. Later, the controversial East German writer Christa Wolf, thinking about dire predictions of nuclear war, retold the story of Cassandra. Alessandro Baricco, in the afterward of his new novelization of the “Iliad,” titled “An Iliad” (Alfred A. Knopf, 160 pages, $21), wonders what it means, “at a time like this,” to be drawn to a text that “is a monument to war.”

Mr. Baricco is alive to “the beauty of war.”Yet his text does not prize, as Christopher Logue’s famous translations of battle scenes do, the degree zero of action. Rather, his is a character-based “Iliad.” Unlike Weil, who believed “force” was the true subject of the “Iliad” and went so far as to leave character’s names out of her quotations, Mr. Baricco believes that the violence of the “Iliad” is significant primarily as an event in the lives of the men who enact it.

For millennia, he writes, men have looked forward to war: “It was almost the only possibility for changing one’s destiny, for discovering the truth of oneself, for gaining a high ethical knowledge.” This partly explains why each of his chapters is narrated by a different character, in the first person.

Originally intended for public readings, Mr. Baricco’s prose text, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, is itself an adaptation based on an Italian translation. When Paris prepares to duel with Menelaus, we hear Helen, watching from the city walls, narrate:

I watched Paris, my new husband, put on his armor: first the fine greaves, fastened with silver pins; then the breastplate over his chest; and the bronze sword studded with silver, and the big heavy shield.

This is pretty close to more traditional translations, such as Robert Fagles’s:

First he wrapped his legs with well-made greaves,
fastened behind the heels with silver ankle-clasps,
next he strapped a breastplate round his chest,
his brother Lycaon’s that fitted him so well.
Then over his shoulder Paris slung his sword,
the fine bronze blade with its silver-studded hilt …

Mr. Baricco, in his preface, explains that he chose a first-person format because,”for the audience of today, hearing the story from those who lived it makes it easier to become involved.” Perhaps.

On the page, the voices blur. It’s perhaps for the best that they mostly sound like the objective-voiced original. And curiously, Mr. Baricco’s interest in the personal, transfiguring experience of battle does not lead him to put the action in the mouth of its principal fighters. When violence does come to a narrator’s hands, his voice either sticks close to Homer’s: “I was like a lion who meets a flock without its shepherd, and pounces in the midst of it, raging,” or diverges only to dull subjectivity, “I kill them one after another, blood everywhere, I kill.”

The crucial conflicts are left to the omniscient eye of distant narrators. Hector’s fight with Achilles is witnessed by his wife, Andromache. It would have been interesting to have this from Hector’s point of view; his snap resolution, after his third circuit around the city walls, to turn and face his nemesis certainly illustrates the possibility of high ethical knowledge.

Mr. Baricco intervenes more confidently at reflective moments. Most memorably, Hector, having finally battled the Acheans back to their black ships, pauses to recall the day they arrived, nine years previous. “There were more than a thousand, on that stretch of sea that had been in our view since we were children, but we had never seen it touched by something that was not friendly, and small, and rare.”

Mr. Baricco’s other major formal innovation has been to leave out the gods. He quotes Lukács: “The novel is the epic of a world deserted by the gods.” He believes that the gods mar the tale’s pace and are unnecessary, “from a storytelling point of view, and only that.”

This leads his text into several awkward spots. For example, after Paris flees Menelaus, Aphrodite, appearing as an old woman, forces Helen to go to him. But Mr. Baricco cannot mention Aphrodite, so the old woman’s power over Helen becomes inexplicable: “Old people, often, inspire fear,” Mr. Baricco writes.

In another spot, the speaker is confused by the Trojans’ mysterious retreat: “There was something I didn’t understand,” he says. But Mr. Fagles has Zeus, grandly, keeping his eyes “fixed on the struggling mass forever, / the Father’s spirit churning, thrashing out the ways,” until he decides to inspire fear in the Trojans. That churning, the peculiar divine amorality, helps makes the “Iliad” what it is.

Mr. Baricco’s text may not plumb the experience of violence as deeply as his subjective strategy would seem to make possible, but it does achieve what may have been its true goal. This is a uniquely accessible version of the “Iliad.” Other prose versions, like that of E.V. Rieu, have been more faithful to Homer’s repetitions but have lacked the compensatory rhythm of the verse. Mr. Baricco’s “Iliad” can be read in a long sitting and has very little repetition. Its shortness also makes possible a comprehensive grasp of the whole story. Mr. Baricco’s preface claims that when a reading was broadcast on Italian radio, numerous people reported sitting still in parked cars, unwilling to turn off the radio. I can believe that.

blytal@nysun.com