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The Lost Books of the Odyssey
A brilliant and beguiling reimagining of one of our greatest myths by a gifted young writer, Zachary Mason’s brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer’s classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer’s original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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November 18, 2017
I had a huge crush on Bronze Age Greece in my youth, though it was the women who fascinated me – Cassandra, Ariadne, Clytemnestra, Medea, Electra. The men, on the other hand, bored me a bit, often appearing like boy children in a school playground vying for prominence in a vainglorious male hierarchy of heroic one-upmanship. They are men whittled down to a single obsession which almost always has vanity at its root. As such they might now serve as powerful warnings of the damage men can wreak when they are motivated by vanity – what better example in our world than Donald Trump? Except for Odysseus. Odysseus was cool because he was way more complex, because he owned his vulnerability and forged something creative of it. He was the man of many faces. In other words, he had an inner life. If the Iliad is a paean to warmongering – arguably only the Bible has inspired more wars: Alexander was besotted by it as was Byron who it lured to a premature death – the Odyssey is about the ultimate destination in life – the homecoming. And it’s also about the ambiguous nature of storytelling itself and as such a far more sophisticated work of literature. There’s very little free will in The Iliad; The Odyssey is electric with the conflict between autonomy and predestination throughout. Perhaps Ulysses’ most defining moment is when he fakes madness to get out of going to war, hardly a ruse likely to appeal to the Hitlers and Mussolinis of this world. Ultimately Ulysses faces the challenge of getting his priorities straight – the ultimate challenge for us all.
Zachary Mason retells Odysseus’ story in fragments, from a multitude of viewpoints, stories within stories rife with contradictions, with new leads. He creates a labyrinthine mosaic where any notion of objective truth is ever more elusive. In one version Ulysses, disguised, is telling his own story – the most unreliable narrator of all is probably the person recounting his own deeds.
I can’t remember ever enjoying a book by someone I’d never heard of as much as I enjoyed this. The writing is imaginatively resourceful and wise without ever going overboard. It’s a magical book brimming with ravishing images. Perhaps not every fragment is wholly successful but the same might be said of Calvino’s Invisible Cities which this book echoes in some ways. I’m not saying it’s as good as Calvino but I’d definitely recommend it. And thanks to Roger Brunyate whose review inspired me to buy the book.
Zachary Mason retells Odysseus’ story in fragments, from a multitude of viewpoints, stories within stories rife with contradictions, with new leads. He creates a labyrinthine mosaic where any notion of objective truth is ever more elusive. In one version Ulysses, disguised, is telling his own story – the most unreliable narrator of all is probably the person recounting his own deeds.
I can’t remember ever enjoying a book by someone I’d never heard of as much as I enjoyed this. The writing is imaginatively resourceful and wise without ever going overboard. It’s a magical book brimming with ravishing images. Perhaps not every fragment is wholly successful but the same might be said of Calvino’s Invisible Cities which this book echoes in some ways. I’m not saying it’s as good as Calvino but I’d definitely recommend it. And thanks to Roger Brunyate whose review inspired me to buy the book.
September 13, 2018
A beautifully quirky reimagination of Odyssey along multiple lines of parallel thought, diaphanous worlds, choice happenstances, clever entanglements of fate and wit, human and otherwise.
Well, if it isn't the geekiest take on Odysseus's adventures… I seriously enjoyed Odysseus and Athena in this one.
Q:
He called together his wisest men, Nestor, Palamedes and wily Odysseus, and commissioned them to write for him a book that clearly and explicitly explained everything under the sun, even unto all the mysteries hidden within the earth, the true names of every living thing, the number of grains of sand on the Troad, the secret histories of the gods and the tumultuous futures of the stars, all to be writ fair in no more and no less than a thousand pages. …
The counselors conferred in low voices out of the king’s hearing, speaking of the state of the king’s mind and vanity, the innate interest of the task, whether the taskmaster would be able to recognize a solution… (c) Sounds like the story of modern consulting development.
Q:
It had been impossible to fit this wealth of knowledge into a mere thousand pages (even with letters no larger than a grain of the ubiquitous white sand) so the sages had made the book read differently and coherently forward and backward, from bottom to top and top to bottom, if every other word was skipped, and if every third letter was ignored and so on. (c) Fat load of fun, it must have been. Both reading and creating such a monstrosity.
Q:
He had spent the days of his exile imagining different homecoming scenarios but it had never occurred to him that she would just give up. … “Such a long trip,” he thinks, “and so many places I could have stayed along the way.” (c)
Q:
In the Imperial Court of Agamemnon, the serene, the lofty, the disingenuous, the elect of every corner of the empire, there were three viziers, ten consuls, twenty generals, thirty admirals, fifty hierophants, a hundred assassins, eight hundred administrators of the second degree, two thousand administrators of the third and clerks, soldiers, courtesans, scholars, painters, musicians, beggars, larcenists, arsonists, stranglers, sycophants and hangers-on of no particular description beyond all number, all poised to do the bright, the serene, the etc. emperor’s will. (c)
Q:
Agamemnon called for the clerk of Suicides, Temple Offerings, Investitures, Bankruptcy and Humane and Just Liquidation, and signed Odysseus’s death warrant.
The clerk of Suicides etc. bowed and with due formality passed the document to the General who Holds Death in His Right Hand, who annotated it, stamped it, and passed it to the Viceroy of Domestic Matters Involving Mortality and so on through the many twists and turns of the bureaucracy, through the hands of spy-masters, career criminals, blind assassins, mendacious clerics and finally to the lower ranks of advisors who had been promoted to responsibility for their dedication and competence (rare qualities given their low wages and the contempt with which they were treated by their well-connected or nobly born superiors), one of whom noted it was a death order of high priority and without reading it assigned it to that master of battle and frequent servant of the throne, Odysseus. (c)
Q:
But in fact there was no warning and I had no dreams, waking before dawn to a morning like every other morning on the long shore of Troy, alone in my tent—the smell of wood smoke, the light of false dawn, the silhouettes of passing soldiers on the canvas wall. (c)
Q:
Odysseus, the wanderer, the eloquent, the silver-tongued, walked along wooded paths over high sea cliffs affording glimpses of the harbor, the distant city and the shining white-capped waves, the sort of place of which a man lost in mazy sea ways and the malice of petty gods might dream. (c)
Q:
Among the Phaeacians it is believed that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else. … When his story ends a Phaeacian does not die but goes on to play another role in a different story told by the same teller. In this way the changes of station endemic to Phaeacian life are explained. (c)
Q:
As long as he is remote, a distant voice, an abstraction, you are the master of your life and lands and all things are possible to you. But once you have seen his face and taken his measure, then the endless possibilities, always an illusion, will dissolve, and your life will be revealed as the poor invention of a limited mind, rarely inspired. (c)
Q:
Everyone in that city has a royal ancestor no less than four generations back and considers himself a prince biding his time—likewise, everyone has a great-aunt or great-uncle who must be confined in an attic. (c)
Q:
If you welcome death you are gently mad. (c)
Q:
unimportant. Even with the sweetness of the evening, the harbor full of my ships, the firelight in the palace windows, I would have lived enough, would have understood my life’s shape, if I could meet the teller and know him. (c)
Q:
For this reason the Phaeacians consider silence an act of kindness, as sacred as guest friendship, a grant of repose to a distant stranger. (c)
Q:
When opened the book released a waft like hot iron in a winter forge. (c)
Q:
The mathematics underlying the populations of herring in the sea, the evolution of the stars and the fencing style of a certain little-known sect of Sicilian masters, and how these disparate things are secretly ruled by a single idea. (c)
Q:
I wanted a book that gave me some understanding, not this cabinet of wonders and analogies, this encyclopedia of encyclopedias tricked into a millennium of pages. (c)
Q:
tatterdemalion (c)
Q:
His style was uninformed by tactics or consequences. (c)
Q:
I did not wish to number myself among the sacrifices and therefore became a skilled tactician, anticipating the places where the Trojans would attack and being elsewhere. (с)
Q:
Cultivating him was easy, as the other chiefs found him stand-offish and abstemious and he had few friends. (c)
Q:
I questioned the value of an immortality that lasted exactly until one died but his fatalism was impregnable and he laughed at me and called me a sophist. (c)
Q:
This was five years into the war. Any sane man would have called it a loss, or perhaps found some way to construe it as a victory, and gone home … (c)
Q:
his mind was full of dead suns, ancient cities made of ice, cold still things, quiet and thoughtful, on the edge of slipping into nothing. Of falling forever. (c)
Q:
In the eighteenth century B.C. there was a thriving cult of the goddess Quickness, known for virginity, quick thinking, harsh laughter and an association with owls. (c)
Q:
There is no action under the sun that does not entail myriad effects, all of which leave signs, and from this chain of signs all previous actions can be inferred. (с)
Q:
I fancied myself a philosopher although for the most part my philosophizing consisted of staring out to sea, usually with a fishing pole in my hand, thinking of nothing. The sun would bore into my brain over the hours and drive out everything except a ringing brightness, making everything look hollow or flat. (с)
Q:
we are revealed in our lies (c)
Q:
She thought of fleeing but knew from the fall of the city wall’s shadow, from the voice of the wind sighing through the towers and from the shapes of the bright clouds overhead, always changing, that it would not be so, that her fate was elsewhere, that for once the god had lied. (с)
Q:
Like me, you have the knack of stringing victory together out of whatever is at hand. (c)
Q:
It is a shame that the way of the Olympians is to help their protégés help themselves… (c)
Q:
wanton termagant sorceress wife (c)
Q:
Odysseus returned and so shall I (c)
Well, if it isn't the geekiest take on Odysseus's adventures… I seriously enjoyed Odysseus and Athena in this one.
Q:
He called together his wisest men, Nestor, Palamedes and wily Odysseus, and commissioned them to write for him a book that clearly and explicitly explained everything under the sun, even unto all the mysteries hidden within the earth, the true names of every living thing, the number of grains of sand on the Troad, the secret histories of the gods and the tumultuous futures of the stars, all to be writ fair in no more and no less than a thousand pages. …
The counselors conferred in low voices out of the king’s hearing, speaking of the state of the king’s mind and vanity, the innate interest of the task, whether the taskmaster would be able to recognize a solution… (c) Sounds like the story of modern consulting development.
Q:
It had been impossible to fit this wealth of knowledge into a mere thousand pages (even with letters no larger than a grain of the ubiquitous white sand) so the sages had made the book read differently and coherently forward and backward, from bottom to top and top to bottom, if every other word was skipped, and if every third letter was ignored and so on. (c) Fat load of fun, it must have been. Both reading and creating such a monstrosity.
Q:
He had spent the days of his exile imagining different homecoming scenarios but it had never occurred to him that she would just give up. … “Such a long trip,” he thinks, “and so many places I could have stayed along the way.” (c)
Q:
In the Imperial Court of Agamemnon, the serene, the lofty, the disingenuous, the elect of every corner of the empire, there were three viziers, ten consuls, twenty generals, thirty admirals, fifty hierophants, a hundred assassins, eight hundred administrators of the second degree, two thousand administrators of the third and clerks, soldiers, courtesans, scholars, painters, musicians, beggars, larcenists, arsonists, stranglers, sycophants and hangers-on of no particular description beyond all number, all poised to do the bright, the serene, the etc. emperor’s will. (c)
Q:
Agamemnon called for the clerk of Suicides, Temple Offerings, Investitures, Bankruptcy and Humane and Just Liquidation, and signed Odysseus’s death warrant.
The clerk of Suicides etc. bowed and with due formality passed the document to the General who Holds Death in His Right Hand, who annotated it, stamped it, and passed it to the Viceroy of Domestic Matters Involving Mortality and so on through the many twists and turns of the bureaucracy, through the hands of spy-masters, career criminals, blind assassins, mendacious clerics and finally to the lower ranks of advisors who had been promoted to responsibility for their dedication and competence (rare qualities given their low wages and the contempt with which they were treated by their well-connected or nobly born superiors), one of whom noted it was a death order of high priority and without reading it assigned it to that master of battle and frequent servant of the throne, Odysseus. (c)
Q:
But in fact there was no warning and I had no dreams, waking before dawn to a morning like every other morning on the long shore of Troy, alone in my tent—the smell of wood smoke, the light of false dawn, the silhouettes of passing soldiers on the canvas wall. (c)
Q:
Odysseus, the wanderer, the eloquent, the silver-tongued, walked along wooded paths over high sea cliffs affording glimpses of the harbor, the distant city and the shining white-capped waves, the sort of place of which a man lost in mazy sea ways and the malice of petty gods might dream. (c)
Q:
Among the Phaeacians it is believed that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else. … When his story ends a Phaeacian does not die but goes on to play another role in a different story told by the same teller. In this way the changes of station endemic to Phaeacian life are explained. (c)
Q:
As long as he is remote, a distant voice, an abstraction, you are the master of your life and lands and all things are possible to you. But once you have seen his face and taken his measure, then the endless possibilities, always an illusion, will dissolve, and your life will be revealed as the poor invention of a limited mind, rarely inspired. (c)
Q:
Everyone in that city has a royal ancestor no less than four generations back and considers himself a prince biding his time—likewise, everyone has a great-aunt or great-uncle who must be confined in an attic. (c)
Q:
If you welcome death you are gently mad. (c)
Q:
unimportant. Even with the sweetness of the evening, the harbor full of my ships, the firelight in the palace windows, I would have lived enough, would have understood my life’s shape, if I could meet the teller and know him. (c)
Q:
For this reason the Phaeacians consider silence an act of kindness, as sacred as guest friendship, a grant of repose to a distant stranger. (c)
Q:
When opened the book released a waft like hot iron in a winter forge. (c)
Q:
The mathematics underlying the populations of herring in the sea, the evolution of the stars and the fencing style of a certain little-known sect of Sicilian masters, and how these disparate things are secretly ruled by a single idea. (c)
Q:
I wanted a book that gave me some understanding, not this cabinet of wonders and analogies, this encyclopedia of encyclopedias tricked into a millennium of pages. (c)
Q:
tatterdemalion (c)
Q:
His style was uninformed by tactics or consequences. (c)
Q:
I did not wish to number myself among the sacrifices and therefore became a skilled tactician, anticipating the places where the Trojans would attack and being elsewhere. (с)
Q:
Cultivating him was easy, as the other chiefs found him stand-offish and abstemious and he had few friends. (c)
Q:
I questioned the value of an immortality that lasted exactly until one died but his fatalism was impregnable and he laughed at me and called me a sophist. (c)
Q:
This was five years into the war. Any sane man would have called it a loss, or perhaps found some way to construe it as a victory, and gone home … (c)
Q:
his mind was full of dead suns, ancient cities made of ice, cold still things, quiet and thoughtful, on the edge of slipping into nothing. Of falling forever. (c)
Q:
In the eighteenth century B.C. there was a thriving cult of the goddess Quickness, known for virginity, quick thinking, harsh laughter and an association with owls. (c)
Q:
There is no action under the sun that does not entail myriad effects, all of which leave signs, and from this chain of signs all previous actions can be inferred. (с)
Q:
I fancied myself a philosopher although for the most part my philosophizing consisted of staring out to sea, usually with a fishing pole in my hand, thinking of nothing. The sun would bore into my brain over the hours and drive out everything except a ringing brightness, making everything look hollow or flat. (с)
Q:
we are revealed in our lies (c)
Q:
She thought of fleeing but knew from the fall of the city wall’s shadow, from the voice of the wind sighing through the towers and from the shapes of the bright clouds overhead, always changing, that it would not be so, that her fate was elsewhere, that for once the god had lied. (с)
Q:
Like me, you have the knack of stringing victory together out of whatever is at hand. (c)
Q:
It is a shame that the way of the Olympians is to help their protégés help themselves… (c)
Q:
wanton termagant sorceress wife (c)
Q:
Odysseus returned and so shall I (c)
September 13, 2016
Excellent. A brilliant idea beautifully executed. Prose as light as air. I questioned a few words (overreact, afterimage, etc.), which did not seem in keeping with the setting of antiquity, but found very little else amiss. One of Mason's models is Jorge Luis Borges--who once said that instead of creating tedious booklength narratives novelists should write critiques of imaginary books, which is essentially what Mason has done here--another influence may be Italo Calvino. The novel made me want to go back and reread Robert Fagles's translations of Homer. I can't praise this little book enough.
December 2, 2013
This was a transformative book – for the author more so than for me. Mason was a computer scientist working in AI. He had no formal education in either fiction or the classics, but had an abiding interest in The Odyssey since his early teenage years. When he finally completed this book after plugging away on it for years, he got zero interest from publishers or agents. Then he won a young writers’ competition and suddenly became a star. I noticed in his bio that he’s now teaching at Oxford – the one in England, no less.
My own transformation was more limited. It wasn’t that I disliked it; it’s more that I didn’t have much of a starting point to transform myself away from. I don’t think O Brother Where Art Thou counts as a very thorough grounding. But even without Homer as a springboard, I could tell that this was a very clever re-imagining of the classic travel adventure. It was confusing at first since the order was all scattered and the stories sometimes contradicted one another. (For instance, the various accounts of Penelope’s actions during his absence ran the gamut fidelity-wise.) But it was evidently very much in the spirit of the tales that had been told aloud for generations prior to Homer converting them to poetry and committing them to papyrus.
I liked Mason’s tone. His Odysseus was a man of many faces – often, but not always, brave, honorable, witty and wise. The mixture was inconsistent, but that was alright. This underscores how a legend like The Odyssey coalesced from many different sources. Variations would be expected as a consequence of repeated retelling and different takes on human/god behavior. Mason’s contributions reminded me of I’m Not There, the movie that was described as ruminations on Bob Dylan. The six character portrayals it featured were not meant to be of Dylan himself, but to embody different aspects of his music and life. Each of Mason’s 44 mini-chapters were inspired by the original, but were riffs he could call his own. Characters like Penelope, Telemachus, Achilles, Calypso, Agamemnon, Helen, the Cyclops and the sirens were also given their due. My favorite vignettes were the ones where Odysseus outwits some adversary. I also enjoyed it when some seemingly more modern insight into the way of folks was put to us in a distant historical context. A smart guy like Mason had plenty of those moments. For that matter, Homer probably did, too.
I imagine this is a great book for Homerphiles. It was even pretty good for a sham scholar like me. Plus, it’s a lot more accessible than anything Joyce wrote.
My own transformation was more limited. It wasn’t that I disliked it; it’s more that I didn’t have much of a starting point to transform myself away from. I don’t think O Brother Where Art Thou counts as a very thorough grounding. But even without Homer as a springboard, I could tell that this was a very clever re-imagining of the classic travel adventure. It was confusing at first since the order was all scattered and the stories sometimes contradicted one another. (For instance, the various accounts of Penelope’s actions during his absence ran the gamut fidelity-wise.) But it was evidently very much in the spirit of the tales that had been told aloud for generations prior to Homer converting them to poetry and committing them to papyrus.
I liked Mason’s tone. His Odysseus was a man of many faces – often, but not always, brave, honorable, witty and wise. The mixture was inconsistent, but that was alright. This underscores how a legend like The Odyssey coalesced from many different sources. Variations would be expected as a consequence of repeated retelling and different takes on human/god behavior. Mason’s contributions reminded me of I’m Not There, the movie that was described as ruminations on Bob Dylan. The six character portrayals it featured were not meant to be of Dylan himself, but to embody different aspects of his music and life. Each of Mason’s 44 mini-chapters were inspired by the original, but were riffs he could call his own. Characters like Penelope, Telemachus, Achilles, Calypso, Agamemnon, Helen, the Cyclops and the sirens were also given their due. My favorite vignettes were the ones where Odysseus outwits some adversary. I also enjoyed it when some seemingly more modern insight into the way of folks was put to us in a distant historical context. A smart guy like Mason had plenty of those moments. For that matter, Homer probably did, too.
I imagine this is a great book for Homerphiles. It was even pretty good for a sham scholar like me. Plus, it’s a lot more accessible than anything Joyce wrote.
November 28, 2017
As a child I was obsessed with mythology, especially Ancient Egyptian, Norse and, of course, Greek. Every encyclopedia in my personal library which wasn’t devoted to animals of all sorts was devoted to myths from all over the world. I used to own many of them (I still do) and cherish them (that I don’t do now), because in a way they were more than just books, – cover, spine, paper – they were stories cosily settled between the pages, doors to oh so many other worlds, centuries and cultures. I enjoyed these stories so much that every myth related book now has to compete with them. Every new book has to prove it’s able to bring the same kind of pure, childish joy. And here’s the problem with this particular book. I know Zachary Mason’s writing is for sure far more sophisticated than that of writers of myths collection for children. The point of view presented by an adult is inevitably more complicated than that of a child. The world painted with daring brushstrokes is much more intricate and many-sided. That said, the problem with this book is the problem of my perception and expectation. I read The Lost Books of the Odyssey as a very good book (which it is), closed it and found no sweet aftertaste, I'm left with calculated admiration of an adult who's come across one more very well-written book in her life.
April 1, 2017
The Odyssey is a nice, easy to read story with the typical Greek literary virtues of lucidity and ambiguity (Euripedes does it best, imho), but it seems to me to be almost pathologically verbose in the fight scenes (there are interesting possible Reasons, written about by scholars like Simone Weil, why the violence is so OTT in Homer, but I still have to skip pages to be able to carry on at times. Ovid is even worse) and rather scant when it comes to certain long periods during which all sorts of interesting things could have happened that the poet didn’t care to record.
It’s vaguely possible that Zachary had the same idea as me and started filling in the gaps with imagined “lost books”. Somewhere along the line, the reimagining took on counterfactual and meta aspects (or perhaps it started out that way, I’m just reimagining it myself) and became a commentary on the life of the text as well as an extension of the text and its characters.
This kind of fun is all well and good, and I appreciated the clear, sometimes beautiful prose, but there were, I guess, too few moments when Mason’s Lost Books touched on The Stuff I Really Care About (whatever that is. Probably it can be inferred from some of my other reviews) for them to make much more than a pleasant ripple in my attention. No accounting for taste I guess. I didn’t like Invisible Cities either.
It’s vaguely possible that Zachary had the same idea as me and started filling in the gaps with imagined “lost books”. Somewhere along the line, the reimagining took on counterfactual and meta aspects (or perhaps it started out that way, I’m just reimagining it myself) and became a commentary on the life of the text as well as an extension of the text and its characters.
This kind of fun is all well and good, and I appreciated the clear, sometimes beautiful prose, but there were, I guess, too few moments when Mason’s Lost Books touched on The Stuff I Really Care About (whatever that is. Probably it can be inferred from some of my other reviews) for them to make much more than a pleasant ripple in my attention. No accounting for taste I guess. I didn’t like Invisible Cities either.
March 26, 2021
Odysseia destanının güncellenmiş düzyazı ile yazılmış modern bir düzenlemesi. Klasik Homeros’un yerini çağdaş Homeros Zachary Mason almış. Hayalgücünü kullanarak Odysseus’un öyküsünü 44 bölümde yeniden yazmış. En çok 25. bölüm “Kış Kitabını” sevdim. Çok keyifli bir okuma oldu, hayal gücümü canlandırdı. Sona doğru Achilleus ile Büyük İskender’e yolculuk kitapta sürpriz bir bölümdü.
Bu kitabı okumak için Homeros’un İlyada ve Odessa destanlarını okumak en azından geniş bir özetini bilmek gerekiyor. Hatta Truva filmini seyretmek bile yetebilir. Ancak bunlardan birtanesi hakkında dahi bilginiz yoksa kitabı okumayın. Yunan Mitolojisi ve Homeros Destanları’nı sevenlere öneririm.
Bu kitabı okumak için Homeros’un İlyada ve Odessa destanlarını okumak en azından geniş bir özetini bilmek gerekiyor. Hatta Truva filmini seyretmek bile yetebilir. Ancak bunlardan birtanesi hakkında dahi bilginiz yoksa kitabı okumayın. Yunan Mitolojisi ve Homeros Destanları’nı sevenlere öneririm.
June 12, 2008
A sort of fictional apocrypha to Homer's original Odyssey, the faux introduction claims that the Lost Books come from a document that has been transcribed and handed down over time and only recently deciphered into a number of smaller books exploring different themes and variations of this story.
What if Odysseus was a coward, whose actions ultimately resulted in the defeat of both sides, and he spent the next ten years disguised as a bard, telling the tale that became the Odyssey that we know today? What if he was a sorcerer who fashioned Achilles out of clay and gave him life by the light of a full moon? What if Penelope gave up hope and killed herself, and Odysseus encountered her shade in the land of the dead? What if it was Odysseus who secretly married Helen, and not Menelaus? What if Paris was the guise worn by Death, and Troy was his citadel of the dead? What if the real reason Odysseus suffered so many trials on his journey home was because he'd rejected the advances of Athena?
Also, the writing is phenomenal. A great read, I can't recommend this enough.
What if Odysseus was a coward, whose actions ultimately resulted in the defeat of both sides, and he spent the next ten years disguised as a bard, telling the tale that became the Odyssey that we know today? What if he was a sorcerer who fashioned Achilles out of clay and gave him life by the light of a full moon? What if Penelope gave up hope and killed herself, and Odysseus encountered her shade in the land of the dead? What if it was Odysseus who secretly married Helen, and not Menelaus? What if Paris was the guise worn by Death, and Troy was his citadel of the dead? What if the real reason Odysseus suffered so many trials on his journey home was because he'd rejected the advances of Athena?
Also, the writing is phenomenal. A great read, I can't recommend this enough.
December 11, 2007
underneath the cleverness and the copulating mirrors and the labyrinth architecture--of which there's admirably much--there's a melancholic source to all these odyssey-reflecting tales (victor of last year's penultimate starcherone fiction contest). all its revelations--the gods' winner's blues, the existential angst of the ancients, the mundane provenance of legends--are told with a wistful and appropriately epic heaviness.
how he wrings from the original more and more and more... and yet the world isn't exactly enlarged or reduced... i don't know exactly how to describe it, but the accomplishment is something like adding (seemingly) infinite perspectives to an unchanging object... calvino's invisible cities and queneau's exercises in style are close kin.
its main accomplishment? how it shows us we are, even within our mortal limits, inexhaustible. its main drawback? for me, that it goes on a touch too long and lets the (illusion of) inexhastible-ness falter at the end. but that's a quibble. try it mikey you might like it...
how he wrings from the original more and more and more... and yet the world isn't exactly enlarged or reduced... i don't know exactly how to describe it, but the accomplishment is something like adding (seemingly) infinite perspectives to an unchanging object... calvino's invisible cities and queneau's exercises in style are close kin.
its main accomplishment? how it shows us we are, even within our mortal limits, inexhaustible. its main drawback? for me, that it goes on a touch too long and lets the (illusion of) inexhastible-ness falter at the end. but that's a quibble. try it mikey you might like it...
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June 29, 2019Duru, sarih bir dili var. Bazı öykülerde üstkurmaca çok güzel kulanılmış. Gülümseten, ufuk açan, çok fazla duyduğumuz hikayelere tersten bakmamızı sağlayan birçok öykü var. Mesela Odyssesus'un kör ettiği kiklop kendi öyküsünü, Kalypso da kendi öyküsünü anlatabilme fırsatı yakalamış Zackary Mason sayesinde. Ama daha az öykü olsaymış, bu çok kuvvetli öykülerin etkisi daha güçlü olurmuş gibi geldi. Bir süre sonra birbirine çok benzeyen öyküler içinde bu parlak yıldızlar da silikleşip sönmeye başladı, zihnim dağıldı biraz.
July 11, 2011
I wanted to like this a lot, so was probably more disappointed than I should have been. there was a stretch in the middle where I was really into every story, but there were some in the earlier & later parts of the book that were so in love with their own cleverness that it just left a sour taste in my mouth for the whole thing. also, I thought the pseudo-academic footnotes were poorly used, weakly sprinkled throughout & with no clear purpose (specifically, I often couldn't decide if they were being used as a thematic choice or to actually give the reader information.) my other major problem was that the book lacked focus- it needed to have some of the stories that related less to Odysseus/ the odyssey slashed- some of them were very cool and interesting, bur they just felt out of place. unsurprisingly, I did think the best stories were the ones that really felt like alternate myths, not cheeky writing excercises and there just weren't enough of then, which is too bad because the good ones were really quite good.
February 7, 2025
A fun idea for a short story collection, for sure. Taken all together, all these differently imagined takes on (mostly) Odysseus read a bit like Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” and maybe it’s more interesting to think of it as a postmodern novel with a fractal plot. This, if you think about it, is closer to what myth actually is—crowd-sourced, intertextual, made from a haze of story rather than one authorial authority.
The stories, and the writing itself, were a bit uneven for me. I liked the stranger, more Borges-feeling ones, and the ones that felt like a non sequitur fragment of some lost telling. I got tired of the “this is how it really happened” telling i.e. Odysseus, Polyphemus, etc, was just some regular bloke who all this stuff happened to whose story was made heroic by others. There’s a number of those in here. 3.5 stars.
The stories, and the writing itself, were a bit uneven for me. I liked the stranger, more Borges-feeling ones, and the ones that felt like a non sequitur fragment of some lost telling. I got tired of the “this is how it really happened” telling i.e. Odysseus, Polyphemus, etc, was just some regular bloke who all this stuff happened to whose story was made heroic by others. There’s a number of those in here. 3.5 stars.
July 17, 2017
Myth Reconfigured
Great epics such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey do not spring to life fully formed. Rather, they are brought together out of myths that may have been floating around for centuries, but now given a new focus, new continuity, new language. Zachary Mason's book (I can't really call it a novel) takes many of the familiar episodes from both Homeric works, strips them down to essentials, retells them in language that is both lean and evocative, and seeks for new meanings behind the old. In doing so, he also demonstrates how myths come into being, how one story comes to dominate over many possible alternatives, how once-real people get turned into demigods and heroes, and how their reality ultimately disappears into the sagas through which bards have immortalized them.
I am not sure how well a reader needs to know the traditional version of Homer's works to appreciate this book. I myself have read the Iliad but not the Odyssey, although of course many of the stories are familiar (or vaguely so; I get confused by all those islands with sorceresses or monsters on them). I can't imagine anyone with little prior knowledge making much of this book. On the other hand, while greater familiarity with the original will enable the reader to catch more of Mason's references, it may make it more difficult to accept his radical recasting of the stories. Several are given in multiple versions. Among the 44 short chapters (some mere fragments), there are half a dozen accounts of Odysseus' celebrated return to Ithaca. He finds the city ravaged and deserted; he finds Penelope aged or dead, or still beautiful but married to someone else; in one story she is loved, in another barely tolerated; in yet a third, she had been swapped with Helen years before, and the Trojan War was fought over a mere joke and a twice-deceived husband's pride.
At the center of the story is Odysseus, King of Ithaca, beloved of Pallas Athene, architect of the Wooden Horse, the coward, the liar, the fox. "Odysseus, finding his reputation for trickery preceded him, started inventing histories for himself… with the unexpected effect that one of his lies became, with minor variations, the Odyssey of Homer." The deliberately antiheroic presentation of his character makes it easy for the reader to empathize with him, to applaud his invention, to be the co-author of his many-faceted sagas. I use the plural, because my one problem with the book is that it is so very non-linear, somewhat arbitrary in its order, and hard to perceive as a whole. But it does gradually build an unexpectedly touching pathos around the wandering hero. In one story, he and his men land on yet another island to postpone "the impending reality of homecoming and the reversion from warriors to the condition of husbands, sons, and townsmen." In another, he lies in a mountain sanatorium, his memory gone, waiting for some other poet to fill him with purpose. And in the final chapter, he and a few of his former crew, old men all, retrace their voyage past the lost enchanted isles. I was reminded of Tennyson's "Ulysses," perhaps the greatest reworking of the Odysseus myth:
Great epics such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey do not spring to life fully formed. Rather, they are brought together out of myths that may have been floating around for centuries, but now given a new focus, new continuity, new language. Zachary Mason's book (I can't really call it a novel) takes many of the familiar episodes from both Homeric works, strips them down to essentials, retells them in language that is both lean and evocative, and seeks for new meanings behind the old. In doing so, he also demonstrates how myths come into being, how one story comes to dominate over many possible alternatives, how once-real people get turned into demigods and heroes, and how their reality ultimately disappears into the sagas through which bards have immortalized them.
I am not sure how well a reader needs to know the traditional version of Homer's works to appreciate this book. I myself have read the Iliad but not the Odyssey, although of course many of the stories are familiar (or vaguely so; I get confused by all those islands with sorceresses or monsters on them). I can't imagine anyone with little prior knowledge making much of this book. On the other hand, while greater familiarity with the original will enable the reader to catch more of Mason's references, it may make it more difficult to accept his radical recasting of the stories. Several are given in multiple versions. Among the 44 short chapters (some mere fragments), there are half a dozen accounts of Odysseus' celebrated return to Ithaca. He finds the city ravaged and deserted; he finds Penelope aged or dead, or still beautiful but married to someone else; in one story she is loved, in another barely tolerated; in yet a third, she had been swapped with Helen years before, and the Trojan War was fought over a mere joke and a twice-deceived husband's pride.
At the center of the story is Odysseus, King of Ithaca, beloved of Pallas Athene, architect of the Wooden Horse, the coward, the liar, the fox. "Odysseus, finding his reputation for trickery preceded him, started inventing histories for himself… with the unexpected effect that one of his lies became, with minor variations, the Odyssey of Homer." The deliberately antiheroic presentation of his character makes it easy for the reader to empathize with him, to applaud his invention, to be the co-author of his many-faceted sagas. I use the plural, because my one problem with the book is that it is so very non-linear, somewhat arbitrary in its order, and hard to perceive as a whole. But it does gradually build an unexpectedly touching pathos around the wandering hero. In one story, he and his men land on yet another island to postpone "the impending reality of homecoming and the reversion from warriors to the condition of husbands, sons, and townsmen." In another, he lies in a mountain sanatorium, his memory gone, waiting for some other poet to fill him with purpose. And in the final chapter, he and a few of his former crew, old men all, retrace their voyage past the lost enchanted isles. I was reminded of Tennyson's "Ulysses," perhaps the greatest reworking of the Odysseus myth:
Push off, and sitting well in order smiteOnly Tennyson's old hero was sailing westwards, towards new and unknown lands. Mason's Odysseus, in kaleidoscopic self-referentiality, revisits and rewrites his old adventures, coming at last to a Troy where replica relics of the War of Heroes are sold on souvenir stands.
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
July 8, 2017
A very pleasant weekend activity in Edinburgh: browsing the shelves of the Central Library, filling up my library card with new books, crossing the road to the National Library of Scotland, then drinking tea in the café there while reading a just-borrowed book. Today this was the book and I greatly enjoyed it. I love the Iliad and Odyssey, so gravitate towards re-tellings and variations upon them. This one is unusual as it takes the form of 44 little vignettes, some of which are barely more than a paragraph with a punchline. Amongst these ‘lost books’ are possible explanations for how the Odyssey was composed, tales that weave it into other mythologies (Eygptian, Hindu), and versions set at different times in history. The overall effect is somewhat Borgesian, as you feel rather like you’re pulling books off the Odyssey shelf of The Library of Babel and reading a few pages of each. Inevitably, some chapters were more compelling than others, although the whole hung together very well. My favourites did something fresh with the Iliad rather than the Odyssey as such; I have always preferred the former. I particularly liked the variation in which Achilles was a golem. Also memorable were the re-tellings from unexpected points of view: Medusa, for instance, gets a very neat little vignette. Others were slightly too abstract, although all were deftly and fluidly written.
As ever, I was left yearning to re-read the Iliad and thinking about the lasting appeal of Homer's tales. I recently tried to articulate this to a friend and it’s difficult. There is a universality related to the emotions of the characters, I think, combined with a mythic nobility. Thus even modern readers can make some connection with these figures, whilst also seeing their stories as metaphors. But what do I know? Literary analysis is not my academic discipline. Nonetheless, I have noticed that Odysseus seems to be a popular figure for modern re-tellings of ancient Greek stories to focus on - although I can never remember their bloody titles, overshadowed as they are by Homer. In the Iliad, Odysseus seems perhaps more comprehensible and less alien to the modern sensibility. Compared to his fellow warriors, he is less concerned with honour, or at least more willing to interpret it flexibly. He is distinctive for his intelligence and cunning, rather than reckless disregard for his own safety in pursuit of glory. The latter is harder to comprehend today, although it still retains an appealing aura. ‘The Lost Books of The Odyssey’ make Odysseus a liminal figure, more symbol than man. The cultural significance of Homer’s epics supplies the book’s backbone and the central question that it asks: how did Odysseus' story come to have such significance, and why?
As ever, I was left yearning to re-read the Iliad and thinking about the lasting appeal of Homer's tales. I recently tried to articulate this to a friend and it’s difficult. There is a universality related to the emotions of the characters, I think, combined with a mythic nobility. Thus even modern readers can make some connection with these figures, whilst also seeing their stories as metaphors. But what do I know? Literary analysis is not my academic discipline. Nonetheless, I have noticed that Odysseus seems to be a popular figure for modern re-tellings of ancient Greek stories to focus on - although I can never remember their bloody titles, overshadowed as they are by Homer. In the Iliad, Odysseus seems perhaps more comprehensible and less alien to the modern sensibility. Compared to his fellow warriors, he is less concerned with honour, or at least more willing to interpret it flexibly. He is distinctive for his intelligence and cunning, rather than reckless disregard for his own safety in pursuit of glory. The latter is harder to comprehend today, although it still retains an appealing aura. ‘The Lost Books of The Odyssey’ make Odysseus a liminal figure, more symbol than man. The cultural significance of Homer’s epics supplies the book’s backbone and the central question that it asks: how did Odysseus' story come to have such significance, and why?
August 13, 2016
This is a very nice series of riffs on different parts of the Odyssey, taking certain passages of the classic and re-imagining them (often times completely changing the context or speculating well into the future and beyond). It is absolutely not a novel, rather a collection of what-if's, and Mason's love and thought put into the source material is obvious.
It is hard not to compare this to Borges, particularly in the more meta-fictional tales (which I, of course, loved). To give you an example, in one story's nutshell, after Odysseus goes through his many trials, he is stunned to find the gods reconstructing everything so the whole thing can start over, and over, and on and on into possibly infinity, thus creating the similar but different interpretations of the tale that have survived to this day. It's a nice twist, and Mason thankfully keeps all of these stories short, giving us just enough time to get it, and then ending it, leaving you at the last page with a sense of wonder and thoughtfulness.
Even though I compliment the shortness, some stories were TOO short, and the latter half of the book dropped in quality a bit as some ideas seemed not as fleshed out. All in all, impressive stuff, but I find myself hoping Mason writes something soon that is completely independent of previous works, so we can see his imagination unleashed on his own creations.
It is hard not to compare this to Borges, particularly in the more meta-fictional tales (which I, of course, loved). To give you an example, in one story's nutshell, after Odysseus goes through his many trials, he is stunned to find the gods reconstructing everything so the whole thing can start over, and over, and on and on into possibly infinity, thus creating the similar but different interpretations of the tale that have survived to this day. It's a nice twist, and Mason thankfully keeps all of these stories short, giving us just enough time to get it, and then ending it, leaving you at the last page with a sense of wonder and thoughtfulness.
Even though I compliment the shortness, some stories were TOO short, and the latter half of the book dropped in quality a bit as some ideas seemed not as fleshed out. All in all, impressive stuff, but I find myself hoping Mason writes something soon that is completely independent of previous works, so we can see his imagination unleashed on his own creations.
June 17, 2016
İTHAKA’NIN YOLLARI TAŞTAN
Zackary Mason’ın ismini bir yerlere not edin Odysseia’nın Kayıp Bölümleri nam kitabını da mutlaka edinin deriz biz. Niyesini şimdi anlatacağız.
Borges, bir yerlerde, romancıların uzun ve sıkıcı anlatılar yaratmak yerine hayali kitaplara kritikler yazmalarının daha iyi olacağını söyler. Malum, Umberto Eco da Borges’in bu tavsiyesini tutmuş, Yanlış Okumalar’da has edebiyat okurunu mest eden pseudo- akademik tarzda denemeler kaleme almıştır. Gerçekliğinden yahut sahteliğinden tam emin olunamayan yine de bir kurmaca olduğu sezilen ve hali hazırdaki kültür birikimine göndermede bulunan öyküler, denemeler, romanlar, edebiyat dünyasına bildiğimiz kadarıyla Borges’in katkısıdır ve başımızın tacıdır.
Zackary Mason da, Odysseia’nın Kayıp Bölümleri’ne, Mısır’da, arkeolojik bir kazı alanında bulunan freskler, mezar çömlekleri ve papirüslerde Odise Destanına ait olduğu anlaşılan 44 yeni parçaya rastlandığı haberiyle başlar. Bu parçalar, Odise Destanının hiç de Homer’in anlattığı gibi olmadığını gösterir. Kitap, bir roman alt başlığını taşısa da, 44 kısa hikâye olarak okunmaya da açık. Yahut köşe başlarında Borges ve Calvino’nun müstehzi bakışlarla size her seferinde farklı bir yönü gösterdiği devasa bir labirent de denebilir.
Bu pseudo-akademik çerçeve içinde, Odise’ye ait olduğu iddia edilen, bazen neredeyse inandığımız ama her zaman okumaktan keyif aldığımız hikâyeler, ana hikâyenin varyantlarından oluşuyor. Hani şöyle kitaplar vardır: Eğer karakteriniz şunu seçerse sayfa 17’ye gidin, yok değilse bu sayfadan devam edin. Mason da, eğer Odise cesur değilse ne olurdu, savaşa gitmeseydi ne olurdu, Penelope’yi örgüsünün başında bulamazsa ne olurdu gibi sorulara verdiği cevaplar üzerinden farklı anlatılar oluşturmuş. Bu anlatıların istisnasız hepsi de zekice kurgulanmış, okuma zevki yüksek metinler. Birbirine bağlanan, iç içe geçen, zaman zaman muğlaklaşan ancak sağlam üst kurgusundan ödün vermeyen bir kitap Odysseia’nın Kayıp Bölümleri.
Esasen İthaka’ya bir dönüş hikâyesi olan Odise, Mason’ın kaleminde epik tarafları tıraşlanarak kendine dönüş yahut öze dönüş vurgusu arttırılmış. Odise’yi burada insanın arketipi olarak görmek, her bir hikâyeyi de insanın kendini, kendisinin farklı veçhelerini tanıma yolculuğu olarak okumaya o kadar müsait ki, başka türlüsü güç. Mason’un oluşturduğu bu farklı anlatıların yine eski masallarla, bizim geleneğimizdeki menakıbvari hikâyelerle benzerliği ise okumayı zenginleştiren ayrıntılar.
Geleneğin yeniden üretimini tartışıp durduğumuz, çözümler aradığımız bir çeşit “öze dönüş” araştırması yapıp, nereye döneceğimizi bilemeyip yine veçhemizi batıya çevirdiğimiz günlerdeyiz. Çare yok. Edebiyatta, özellikle de anlatının olduğu öykü ve roman gibi türlerde, kendi geleneğimizle bağımızı ancak postmodern anlatı teknikleriyle kurabiliyoruz. Kulağa ne kadar anakronik gelse de belki de gelenek postmoderndi. Yine, belki de kendi geleneğimizi batı üzerinden yeniden keşfedeceğiz. Zira Mason, Odysseia’nın Kayıp Bölümleri ile kendi dâhil olduğu geleneği yeniden üretmeyi, onun özünü korumaya alarak farklı tezahürlere büründürmeyi, bunu da sağlam bir kurgu ve edebi bir lezzet katarak yapmayı başarmış. Darısı başımıza.
Son olarak, duyduğumuz söylentilere göre, Kafka’nın Dönüşüm’ü üzerine çalışıyormuş şu sıralar Mason. Kulak kesilin, çevrildiğinde haberimiz olsun.
Zackary Mason’ın ismini bir yerlere not edin Odysseia’nın Kayıp Bölümleri nam kitabını da mutlaka edinin deriz biz. Niyesini şimdi anlatacağız.
Borges, bir yerlerde, romancıların uzun ve sıkıcı anlatılar yaratmak yerine hayali kitaplara kritikler yazmalarının daha iyi olacağını söyler. Malum, Umberto Eco da Borges’in bu tavsiyesini tutmuş, Yanlış Okumalar’da has edebiyat okurunu mest eden pseudo- akademik tarzda denemeler kaleme almıştır. Gerçekliğinden yahut sahteliğinden tam emin olunamayan yine de bir kurmaca olduğu sezilen ve hali hazırdaki kültür birikimine göndermede bulunan öyküler, denemeler, romanlar, edebiyat dünyasına bildiğimiz kadarıyla Borges’in katkısıdır ve başımızın tacıdır.
Zackary Mason da, Odysseia’nın Kayıp Bölümleri’ne, Mısır’da, arkeolojik bir kazı alanında bulunan freskler, mezar çömlekleri ve papirüslerde Odise Destanına ait olduğu anlaşılan 44 yeni parçaya rastlandığı haberiyle başlar. Bu parçalar, Odise Destanının hiç de Homer’in anlattığı gibi olmadığını gösterir. Kitap, bir roman alt başlığını taşısa da, 44 kısa hikâye olarak okunmaya da açık. Yahut köşe başlarında Borges ve Calvino’nun müstehzi bakışlarla size her seferinde farklı bir yönü gösterdiği devasa bir labirent de denebilir.
Bu pseudo-akademik çerçeve içinde, Odise’ye ait olduğu iddia edilen, bazen neredeyse inandığımız ama her zaman okumaktan keyif aldığımız hikâyeler, ana hikâyenin varyantlarından oluşuyor. Hani şöyle kitaplar vardır: Eğer karakteriniz şunu seçerse sayfa 17’ye gidin, yok değilse bu sayfadan devam edin. Mason da, eğer Odise cesur değilse ne olurdu, savaşa gitmeseydi ne olurdu, Penelope’yi örgüsünün başında bulamazsa ne olurdu gibi sorulara verdiği cevaplar üzerinden farklı anlatılar oluşturmuş. Bu anlatıların istisnasız hepsi de zekice kurgulanmış, okuma zevki yüksek metinler. Birbirine bağlanan, iç içe geçen, zaman zaman muğlaklaşan ancak sağlam üst kurgusundan ödün vermeyen bir kitap Odysseia’nın Kayıp Bölümleri.
Esasen İthaka’ya bir dönüş hikâyesi olan Odise, Mason’ın kaleminde epik tarafları tıraşlanarak kendine dönüş yahut öze dönüş vurgusu arttırılmış. Odise’yi burada insanın arketipi olarak görmek, her bir hikâyeyi de insanın kendini, kendisinin farklı veçhelerini tanıma yolculuğu olarak okumaya o kadar müsait ki, başka türlüsü güç. Mason’un oluşturduğu bu farklı anlatıların yine eski masallarla, bizim geleneğimizdeki menakıbvari hikâyelerle benzerliği ise okumayı zenginleştiren ayrıntılar.
Geleneğin yeniden üretimini tartışıp durduğumuz, çözümler aradığımız bir çeşit “öze dönüş” araştırması yapıp, nereye döneceğimizi bilemeyip yine veçhemizi batıya çevirdiğimiz günlerdeyiz. Çare yok. Edebiyatta, özellikle de anlatının olduğu öykü ve roman gibi türlerde, kendi geleneğimizle bağımızı ancak postmodern anlatı teknikleriyle kurabiliyoruz. Kulağa ne kadar anakronik gelse de belki de gelenek postmoderndi. Yine, belki de kendi geleneğimizi batı üzerinden yeniden keşfedeceğiz. Zira Mason, Odysseia’nın Kayıp Bölümleri ile kendi dâhil olduğu geleneği yeniden üretmeyi, onun özünü korumaya alarak farklı tezahürlere büründürmeyi, bunu da sağlam bir kurgu ve edebi bir lezzet katarak yapmayı başarmış. Darısı başımıza.
Son olarak, duyduğumuz söylentilere göre, Kafka’nın Dönüşüm’ü üzerine çalışıyormuş şu sıralar Mason. Kulak kesilin, çevrildiğinde haberimiz olsun.
October 16, 2018
reinterpretations and retellings; more a collection of short stories with similar themes than something with an overarching narrative, but beautifully written and really unique
July 23, 2012
I’ve never read the Odyssey or the Iliad; my only knowledge of both comes third or fourth-hand (from cinema and literary references*) and so I was a little apprehensive about picking up this book. As the title suggests, it’s a collection of stories – mostly very short – which purport to be a number of missing fragments from the Odyssey. To me it sounded like what a keen Classics scholar might produce over a few quiet weekends, something which might require a similar kind of specialist knowledge to access and enjoy. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
What Mason has done with the story of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca is amazing, and one need only have a slight knowledge of the original to appreciate it. The word that best describes it is haunting; not only because the stories seem to possess a ghostly sensibility, but because for the author, the battle-weary Ulysses is a man pursued and pursuing things half-forgotten, misremembered. Adrift in time, the same story is told again and again except it is not the same: he meets Circe who is also Ariadne from the labyrinth of Minos; Helen of Troy and his wife Penelope switch places; he delivers ancient wisdom to Agamemnon, who rules over a ‘negative image of a palace’ sunken underground in a great white plain. Above all, the implication is that Ulysses himself was the hidden author of the Odyssey, and that so impossibly exaggerated and convoluted were the tales he told about himself and his companions that even Ulysses no longer understands where the truth begins. Some would argue** that this essential unreliability constitutes one definition of postmodernism.
I don’t know whether any or all of what Mason writes about is hinted at in Homer’s originals, and I don’t much care. Because the writing is beautiful. Careful, articulate, never gratuitous, the book possesses a deeply mysterious imagist quality that I found incredibly affecting. People have compared the stories to Borges and Calvino, and this is certainly valid, but Mason is more pared-down, more abstract than both. Borges would have made poems from many of these tales, but while Mason’s prose seems formless by comparison, one has the sense of invisible structures at work even while the text seems totally insubstantial; indeed, Mason has commented in interviews that he originally intended the book to be accompanied by an array of House of Leaves-esque paraphernalia: an appendix, faux-credentials, expanded footnotes, etc. While I’d be fascinated to see what happened to all that, I think he was probably right to cut it out.
One last thing: this isn’t totally relevant to the work, but I was impressed to find that this first novel came from someone who wasn’t previously an established author, or even a full-time writer. Mason now has a Wikipedia entry, but it lists his vocation as ‘computer scientist’ before his career as author. In a time when most advice for would-be writers tends to demand an obsessive degree of commitment, I find it rather wonderful to think that an amateur writer can still produce something so beautifully crafted, so near-perfect in conception and execution.
I literally cannot think of a bad thing to say about this book. Five stars.
* – Most of what I now know about the Odyssey comes from studying James Joyce’s rendition of that story at university. I really think Joyce would have totally understood and enjoyed this book.
** – Not me, particularly.
What Mason has done with the story of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca is amazing, and one need only have a slight knowledge of the original to appreciate it. The word that best describes it is haunting; not only because the stories seem to possess a ghostly sensibility, but because for the author, the battle-weary Ulysses is a man pursued and pursuing things half-forgotten, misremembered. Adrift in time, the same story is told again and again except it is not the same: he meets Circe who is also Ariadne from the labyrinth of Minos; Helen of Troy and his wife Penelope switch places; he delivers ancient wisdom to Agamemnon, who rules over a ‘negative image of a palace’ sunken underground in a great white plain. Above all, the implication is that Ulysses himself was the hidden author of the Odyssey, and that so impossibly exaggerated and convoluted were the tales he told about himself and his companions that even Ulysses no longer understands where the truth begins. Some would argue** that this essential unreliability constitutes one definition of postmodernism.
I don’t know whether any or all of what Mason writes about is hinted at in Homer’s originals, and I don’t much care. Because the writing is beautiful. Careful, articulate, never gratuitous, the book possesses a deeply mysterious imagist quality that I found incredibly affecting. People have compared the stories to Borges and Calvino, and this is certainly valid, but Mason is more pared-down, more abstract than both. Borges would have made poems from many of these tales, but while Mason’s prose seems formless by comparison, one has the sense of invisible structures at work even while the text seems totally insubstantial; indeed, Mason has commented in interviews that he originally intended the book to be accompanied by an array of House of Leaves-esque paraphernalia: an appendix, faux-credentials, expanded footnotes, etc. While I’d be fascinated to see what happened to all that, I think he was probably right to cut it out.
One last thing: this isn’t totally relevant to the work, but I was impressed to find that this first novel came from someone who wasn’t previously an established author, or even a full-time writer. Mason now has a Wikipedia entry, but it lists his vocation as ‘computer scientist’ before his career as author. In a time when most advice for would-be writers tends to demand an obsessive degree of commitment, I find it rather wonderful to think that an amateur writer can still produce something so beautifully crafted, so near-perfect in conception and execution.
I literally cannot think of a bad thing to say about this book. Five stars.
* – Most of what I now know about the Odyssey comes from studying James Joyce’s rendition of that story at university. I really think Joyce would have totally understood and enjoyed this book.
** – Not me, particularly.
June 23, 2011
the lost books of the odyssey is really a collection of very short "what-if" stories that share as a common thread the homeric hero, odysseus, and his adventures. it doesn't read like a novel to me despite the insistence of the title: there's not really a unified plot but rather thematically-connected stories that shift back and forth in time, and reconsider the same moments in the familiar cycle (not only touching on his adventures in the odyssey, but playing on the trojan war as well, even shunting forward in time to alexander the great's day (alexander slept with a copy of homer under his pillow, and this is enough connective tissue to add a story from his perspective to the book).
a grounding in the homeric tales is not necessary to reading the book: it purports to be a translation of apocryphal homeric tales from sherds left behind (this is a vestige of a conceit used by the author in the first edition issued by another publishing house that was reduced in this current picador incarnation) and mason occasionally provides some footnotes, and if i'm generous, i could suggest that the first seven or eight stories fall flat for me because i am well-versed in the homeric tradition and none of these stories really pay-off against the source material (though honestly, i read them twice over, and they didn't spark no matter how much goodwill i had.) the collection got much more interesting to me with the ninth story and then exploded by the fifteenth (seventy-two pages in) as mason began to really play the intertextuality of homeric tradition with other literary and narrative traditions and conventions: there are golems, and werewolves as you proceed through mason's supposed lost tales; there are stories here that read like bloody action films, and some that play like groundhog day. characters begin to transform, and truly transform the traditions they are based on.
standout stories include: "one kindness" -- where the book began to take off for me; "the iliad of odysseus", "killing scylla", "death and the king", -- these three form the violent centre of the book; "victory lament", "the long way back", "alexander's odyssey", and "last islands".
a grounding in the homeric tales is not necessary to reading the book: it purports to be a translation of apocryphal homeric tales from sherds left behind (this is a vestige of a conceit used by the author in the first edition issued by another publishing house that was reduced in this current picador incarnation) and mason occasionally provides some footnotes, and if i'm generous, i could suggest that the first seven or eight stories fall flat for me because i am well-versed in the homeric tradition and none of these stories really pay-off against the source material (though honestly, i read them twice over, and they didn't spark no matter how much goodwill i had.) the collection got much more interesting to me with the ninth story and then exploded by the fifteenth (seventy-two pages in) as mason began to really play the intertextuality of homeric tradition with other literary and narrative traditions and conventions: there are golems, and werewolves as you proceed through mason's supposed lost tales; there are stories here that read like bloody action films, and some that play like groundhog day. characters begin to transform, and truly transform the traditions they are based on.
standout stories include: "one kindness" -- where the book began to take off for me; "the iliad of odysseus", "killing scylla", "death and the king", -- these three form the violent centre of the book; "victory lament", "the long way back", "alexander's odyssey", and "last islands".
July 16, 2015
Utilizing Homer's classic tale of the trials and tribulations of Odysseus, Zachary Mason presents his readership with variations on a theme. Here are alternative courses this destiny might have taken; different choices, different interventions, differing motives and means loosely drawn from the connective tissue of the ancient master's text.
It is difficult at first to accept the shift of direction as Mason's voice sometimes slips into modern-day phrasing and expression, making trust a bit of an issue. Clear that hurdle, though, and there is much to entertain and impress. This is deep work delivered in discreetly-measured doses; most chapters are short, sharp and fully-inhabited. It's Odysseus from a dizzying number of angles, painfully playing out his karmic thread.
"Finally I saw myself, how my wit exceeded that of other men but gave me no leverage against fate, and how in the time to come it would avail me nothing but possibly an understanding of the full scope of my helplessness."
And it is not only Odysseus who receives a new attention - his wife, his son, his gods, his opponents, and his fellow fighting men are also shaken free. I was moved by many of the secondary stories, Scylla's most powerfully:
"You are the fate that has been haunting me since I was born. I huddled in my high cave for fear of you, starving and wretched, venturing out only to snatch a little food when I could. I thought of hiding in a deep cavern or on a high mountain but I was too afraid to leave home. Mine has been a miserable life and now it is ending and I wish I had never heard the name Odysseus."
This is Mason's first novel. I look forward to his second.
It is difficult at first to accept the shift of direction as Mason's voice sometimes slips into modern-day phrasing and expression, making trust a bit of an issue. Clear that hurdle, though, and there is much to entertain and impress. This is deep work delivered in discreetly-measured doses; most chapters are short, sharp and fully-inhabited. It's Odysseus from a dizzying number of angles, painfully playing out his karmic thread.
"Finally I saw myself, how my wit exceeded that of other men but gave me no leverage against fate, and how in the time to come it would avail me nothing but possibly an understanding of the full scope of my helplessness."
And it is not only Odysseus who receives a new attention - his wife, his son, his gods, his opponents, and his fellow fighting men are also shaken free. I was moved by many of the secondary stories, Scylla's most powerfully:
"You are the fate that has been haunting me since I was born. I huddled in my high cave for fear of you, starving and wretched, venturing out only to snatch a little food when I could. I thought of hiding in a deep cavern or on a high mountain but I was too afraid to leave home. Mine has been a miserable life and now it is ending and I wish I had never heard the name Odysseus."
This is Mason's first novel. I look forward to his second.
July 22, 2021
Okay, first off you are going to need to read the Odyssey. Just go do that and come back. And if you read it back in college you're probably going to need to read it again. Otherwise these stories are going to make no sense whatsoever. But once you do, you will be so glad you did because it's like putting on 3-D glasses.
I think my favorite is the one where Odysseus meets his double. Or maybe the one where he's sent to assassinate himself. Or no, maybe the one where Penelope is some kind of feral wilderness person? Anyway, it's beautiful and so, so cleverly made...but as a book of stories there is just no center for me to grab onto and love. I could only like.
I think my favorite is the one where Odysseus meets his double. Or maybe the one where he's sent to assassinate himself. Or no, maybe the one where Penelope is some kind of feral wilderness person? Anyway, it's beautiful and so, so cleverly made...but as a book of stories there is just no center for me to grab onto and love. I could only like.
September 14, 2024
Enjoyable. A number of speculations on the narrative of the Odyssey. Clever, inventive, cool. My favorite was the epic as the dream of a blinded cyclops, inventing the tale of his unknown assailant, but all of them are fun.
September 21, 2010
From the interviews I've read and heard with Zachary Mason, he's irresistible. A child Computer Science prodigy who bounced around Silicon Valley start ups with a lyrical, experimental novel brewing all the while? Sign me up. I love those polymathic types.
The book doesn't disappoint, as long as you go in with an open mind. It's a long series of imaginative snapshots of the Odyssey, most from wildly unorthodox perspectives. What makes Odysseus so different from his other heroic peers is that he gets by with cunning as often as strength and valor. This idea leads Mason to paths where the Odyssey is just PR from Odysseus the Bard. Or that he tricked Agamemnon into going to Troy or into quitting the war.
Connections between the gods and mortals are shuffled, and unexpected narrators share their experiences. Despite the vast combinatorial possibilities, the book is not as scattered as you'd guess. The smooth prose unites the text and contributes to its claim as being "a novel" rather than a selection of short stories, which it is closer to.
One story details Odysseus returning to Troy and finding it flush with impersonators and cheap souvenirs. It isn't a subtle statement about the commercialization of heroism but no one ever stands up for commercialization.
Comparisons to Calvino and Borges are the most obvious and apt. Imagination and ideas trump narrative, though Mason's sense of narrative may be more effective than those other two. He does have the benefit of working with well known characters.
According to interviews, he claims he's working on a similar project based on the Metamorphoses. I bet that will be gold.
The book doesn't disappoint, as long as you go in with an open mind. It's a long series of imaginative snapshots of the Odyssey, most from wildly unorthodox perspectives. What makes Odysseus so different from his other heroic peers is that he gets by with cunning as often as strength and valor. This idea leads Mason to paths where the Odyssey is just PR from Odysseus the Bard. Or that he tricked Agamemnon into going to Troy or into quitting the war.
Connections between the gods and mortals are shuffled, and unexpected narrators share their experiences. Despite the vast combinatorial possibilities, the book is not as scattered as you'd guess. The smooth prose unites the text and contributes to its claim as being "a novel" rather than a selection of short stories, which it is closer to.
One story details Odysseus returning to Troy and finding it flush with impersonators and cheap souvenirs. It isn't a subtle statement about the commercialization of heroism but no one ever stands up for commercialization.
Comparisons to Calvino and Borges are the most obvious and apt. Imagination and ideas trump narrative, though Mason's sense of narrative may be more effective than those other two. He does have the benefit of working with well known characters.
According to interviews, he claims he's working on a similar project based on the Metamorphoses. I bet that will be gold.
July 19, 2014
I fell for this hard. Mason doesn't rip off the Odyssey. He riffs off of it. He takes the images, the characters, the scenarios, and reassembles them into these poignant, beguiling little vignettes that feel reminiscent of Cortazar and Borges but still manage to be completely his own. There's tons of books out there which try to re-tell or rehash classical works. Most of them suck. This book actually enriched my understanding of Homer's Odyssey, it brought out all that was strange, mesmerizing and sad in it while still standing strongly on its own literary feet. In fact, in certain ways, this book might actually be better than The Odyssey itself (there, I said it). Mason is definitely a writer to watch out for. I'd love to see his take on Don Quixote.
December 10, 2021
Zachary Mason versucht in vielerlei Hinsicht, die Geschichte des Odysseus in der eine oder andere Richtung weiterzuspinnen, wobei er entgegen des Namens des Buches meist an die Ilias anknüpft. Gute Idee und manche der jeweils für sich stehenden Kurzgeschichten sind auch gelungen. Beim größten Teil überwiegt leider die Mittelmäßigkeit.
October 24, 2011
This book confirmed for me why it's probably a good thing that Borges never attempted, to my knowledge, to write a novel. What works so splendidly in individual short stories -- the cool tone, provocative ideas combined with fascinating detail -- would've become tiresome over the course of a novel. And that's exactly what happened as I progressed through Mason's book. I was quite delighted, even enchanted in the beginning, but then grew weary of the clever gamesmanship for its own sake. That I could see (and I confess I didn't put much effort into sorting out connections) the chapters didn't seem to build on each other or even resonate in any particularly associative or collage-style fashion. Still, there were individual chapters-stories that I found very engrossing. The final chapter summed up for me the delights and frustrations of the entire book: it presents an intriguing idea that places Odysseus in contemporary light of "celebrity" but this idea seemed to come out of nowhere.
In his NYer review (see below) comparing 3 fictional takes on Greek myth -- by Mason, Malouf, and Banville -- Daniel Mendelsohn argues that the appeal of this genre is that, at its best, it provides new insights into ancient timeless stories that reinforce why such stories remain important and compelling to readers so many centuries later. Between Mason and Malouf, for "Ransom," a reimagining of Priam's visit to Achilles to plead for return of Hector's body, Mason does a much better job of adding something new to our understanding of Homer's genius (Banville was a distant third). Though I haven't yet read Ransom, I think M's criticism of Mason is a valid one.
Still, despite all the misgivings, I think any fan of Homer or Greek mythology, would consider Mason's book, if not a must-read, at least an intriguing riff on one of the great stories of all time. If nothing else, Mason's "lapidary" prose is worth the effort. (actually, I'm not even sure what that means -- slick, spare, but evocative, like stones worn smooth by water? -- but professional reviewers seem to use it all the time, so I thought I'd throw it in there. Anyway, M. writes fine, vivid sentences.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...
In his NYer review (see below) comparing 3 fictional takes on Greek myth -- by Mason, Malouf, and Banville -- Daniel Mendelsohn argues that the appeal of this genre is that, at its best, it provides new insights into ancient timeless stories that reinforce why such stories remain important and compelling to readers so many centuries later. Between Mason and Malouf, for "Ransom," a reimagining of Priam's visit to Achilles to plead for return of Hector's body, Mason does a much better job of adding something new to our understanding of Homer's genius (Banville was a distant third). Though I haven't yet read Ransom, I think M's criticism of Mason is a valid one.
Still, despite all the misgivings, I think any fan of Homer or Greek mythology, would consider Mason's book, if not a must-read, at least an intriguing riff on one of the great stories of all time. If nothing else, Mason's "lapidary" prose is worth the effort. (actually, I'm not even sure what that means -- slick, spare, but evocative, like stones worn smooth by water? -- but professional reviewers seem to use it all the time, so I thought I'd throw it in there. Anyway, M. writes fine, vivid sentences.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...
February 25, 2021
If you love the Odyssey.
Which I do.
Then You'll Also Love.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Which I also do.
Thanks Amazon (except Amazon couldn't make a recommendation that basic, nor could Goodreads for that matter)
This should be a compulsory companion for the Odyssey. It's mesmerising. Some of the stories miss the mark but there are a few which are worth the price of admission alone.
The most poignant of the many stories for me was the one where Odysseus flees the conflict at Troy and takes to the road as a bard, spinning up a story about what happened there and his role in it. Thus the Iliad becomes his bullshit spun into the gold we now read.
The prose is incredibly sturdy and strong, it's not as fluid or sweet as Madeleine Miller's but it carries considerably more weight.
I'd be surprised if Mason ever tops this debut novel but I can't wait for him to prove me wrong.
Which I do.
Then You'll Also Love.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Which I also do.
Thanks Amazon (except Amazon couldn't make a recommendation that basic, nor could Goodreads for that matter)
This should be a compulsory companion for the Odyssey. It's mesmerising. Some of the stories miss the mark but there are a few which are worth the price of admission alone.
The most poignant of the many stories for me was the one where Odysseus flees the conflict at Troy and takes to the road as a bard, spinning up a story about what happened there and his role in it. Thus the Iliad becomes his bullshit spun into the gold we now read.
The prose is incredibly sturdy and strong, it's not as fluid or sweet as Madeleine Miller's but it carries considerably more weight.
I'd be surprised if Mason ever tops this debut novel but I can't wait for him to prove me wrong.
August 14, 2025
I cracked open Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey is an incredible creative flex of a book. Instead of being merely a single retelling of a classic epic or myth akin to Madeline Miller's Circe, this turned out to be a collection of multiple retellings. Some were merely one or two pages long, some lasted for several, but no matter the length, they were all impressive in their originality. I didn't even think a several thousand-year-old tale of a man trying to sail back to Ithaca could be mined for so many new and fresh takes, but Mason found a way to spectacularly pull it off.
October 5, 2014
What an unusual, fabulous, haunting book this is! Can't say that I have ever read anything remotely like it. A wonderful feat of imagination and literary syncretism. Having experienced these forty-four short tales, I will never again be able to think of certain aspects of Homer in quite the same ways.
August 4, 2021
I thought the concept and execution of this book were both fantastic. So clever. I love the idea of a multiplicity of different truths and possible happenings. I will definitely keep it on my favorites shelf to be reread in coming years.
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