The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:5th May '11
Should be back in stock very soon
An extraordinary imagining of episodes, fragments and revisions of Homer's Odyssey, a book destined to become a modern classic.
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; and, he walks into an empty house in ruins.
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.
A subtle, inventive and moving meditation on the nature of story and what Louis MacNeice calls 'the drunkenness of things being various' -- John Banville
Dazzling...an ingeniously Borgesian novel that's witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive. Mr. Mason has found a supple, lyrical voice in these pages that captures the spirit of the original Odyssey and at the same time feels freshly contemporary...a stunning and hypnotic novel * New York Times *
Spellbinding. In his versions of these ancient myths Mason twists and jinks, renegotiating the journey to Ithaca with all the guile and trickery of Odysseus himself -- Simon Armitage
A small triumph...the invention on display is beguiling...He offers the reader a book of intellectual fireworks that also manages to be wonderfully entertaining * Sunday Times *
Impressive * Guardian *
Mason allows this grand myth of homecoming no beginning or end, just banks of fog, endless mirrors, Borgesian labyrinths...Mason delights in doubles, spirals, conceptual mazes and Moebius strips...he is a wondrous pleasure to read * Los Angeles Times *
Dazzling fiction... Following in the tradition of Borges, Mason brilliantly reveals a hero even more ambiguous than in Homer's original and an ancient world beset by 21st century uncertainty * Financial Times *
Dazzlingly imaginative modern take on the oldest of fairy tales...always the alternate universe is created with amazing invention, a poet's gift for a resonant image * Word *
What cannot be stressed enough is the simplicity and control of the verbal texture of the book -- Simon Goldhill * Times Literary Supplement *
Playful, gripping and teasingly philosophical without ever being overwhelming, the book reimagines in plain yet often poetic prose many of the Odyssey's key stories, tantalising the reader with alternative outcomes, unexpected twists and haunting interludes * Sunday Times *
ISBN: 9780099547075
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 15mm
Weight: 170g
240 pages