The Lost Books of the Odyssey
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
After ten years' journeying Odysseus returns, again and again, to Ithaca. Each time he finds something different: his patient wife Penelope has betrayed him and married; his arrival accelerates time and he watches his family age and die in front of him; he walks into an empty house in ruins; he returns but is so bored he sets sail again to repeat his voyage; he comes back to find Penelope is dead.
In these forty-four retellings of passages from Homer's Odyssey, Zachary Mason uses Homer's linear narrative and explodes it: presenting alternative and contradictory fragments of familiar stories - the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens - allowing us to see Homer's masterpiece afresh. Elegant, provocative and utterly fascinating, The Lost Books of the Odyssey seems destined to become a modern classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mason's fantastic first novel, a deft reimagining of Homer's Odyssey, begins with the story as we know it before altering the perspective or fate of the characters in subsequent short story like chapters. Legendary moments of myth are played differently throughout, as when Odysseus forgoes the Trojan horse, or when the Cyclops here a gentle farmer is blinded by Odysseus while he burgles the Cyclops's cave. Mason's other life as a computer scientist informs some chapters, such as "The Long Way Back" in which Daedalus's labyrinth ensnares Theseus in a much different way. Part of what makes this so enjoyable is the firm grasp Mason has on the source material; the footnotes double as humorous asides while reminding readers who aren't familiar with the original that, for instance, Eumaios is "the swineherd who sheltered Odysseus when he first returned to Ithaca and later helped him kill the suitors." This original work consistently surprises and delights.
