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Summary
Summary
Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Newsday
A Kirkus Best Memoir of 2017
Shortlisted for the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize
From award-winning memoirist and critic, and bestselling author of The Lost: a deeply moving tale of a father and son's transformative journey in reading--and reliving--Homer's epic masterpiece.
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth--and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist. But through the sometimes uncomfortable months that the two men explore Homer's great work together--first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son's interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus's famous voyages--it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: Jay's responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last. As this intricately woven memoir builds to its wrenching climax, Mendelsohn's narrative comes to echo the Odyssey itself, with its timeless themes of deception and recognition, marriage and children, the pleasures of travel and the meaning of home. Rich with literary and emotional insight, An Odyssey is a renowned author-scholar's most triumphant entwining yet of personal narrative and literary exploration.
Author Notes
Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning author. He received a B.A. in Classics from the University of Virginia and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University.
Upon completing his Ph.D. in 1994, Mendelsohn began a career in journalism. In 2005 Mendelsohn was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for a translation of Cavafy's "Unfinished" poems, with commentary. His other honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing (2000) and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism (2002).
Mendelsohn's academic speciality is Greek (especially Euripidean) tragedy. In 2015 his title The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million made the New Zealand Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Homeric heroes offer resonant psychological parallels to a modern family in this beguiling memoir. Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million) recounts a freshman class on the Odyssey that he taught at Bard College with his father, Jay, an 81-year-old computer scientist, sitting in; the two followed up with an Odyssey-themed Mediterranean cruise. The result is a small gem of seminar-room slapstick as the author struggles to impart a scholarly gloss to his students' struggles with the text and his dad's crotchety outbursts (Jay disparages the wily Odysseus as less than a "real" hero because "he's a liar and he cheated on his wife" and because he gets his men killed, cries frequently, and is forever in need of rescue and makeovers by the gods). Gradually, Mendelsohn unwraps layers of timeless meaning in the ancient Greek poem: the muted battles seething inside the epic's many troubled marriages (which parallel the battles waged by his own parents); the reunion of Odysseus with the grown son who doesn't know him, their stilted unfamiliarity a template for the awkwardness lingering between the Mendelsohn father and son; and the longing to strike out for unknown parts coupled with the fear that holds men back. Mendelsohn weaves family history and trenchant literary analysis into a luminous whole. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
One of the students in Mendelsohn's spring undergraduate seminar on Homer's Odyssey was quite different from the others. That's because he was Mendelsohn's own father, an 81-year-old retired mathematician. The classroom discussions of Odysseus' long, wandering journey home to Ithaca led father and son to undertake a real-life, 10-day Mediterranean cruise retracing the Greek warrior's travels. As Mendelsohn recounts in this instructive work, he begins to see his father in a new light even while the older man challenges the basic tenets of Homer's epic (How can Odysseus be a hero, he asks, when he loses all his men and cries all the time?). As interesting as the class' progress through the epic turns out to be, it is the author's treatment of his relationship with his father, and the journey of understanding they undertake together, that makes this mixture of literature and life so memorable.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Mendelsohn (Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, Bard Coll.), translator of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, frequent New Yorker contributor, and award-winning author of works including The Lost, here explores the enduring relevance of Homer's Odyssey through a memoir broadly parodying the ancient poem's narrative structure. It centers on the author's father, Jay, deciding to enroll in the freshman Odyssey seminar his son teaches, challenging Mendelsohn's authority as teacher and stimulating his introspection. Mendelsohn's account of the seminar provides an enlightening introduction to Homer's epic. Odysseus's adventures are represented by a father-son Mediterranean cruise, responding to sites associated with Homer. He even includes Athena/Mentor in the form of his own teachers, the classicists Froma Zeitlin and Jenny Strauss Clay. The journeys of Mendelsohn's Telemachus and Jay's -Odysseus trace the complex relationship between father and son: the son's growth and self-discovery in the quest of his father; the father's coming to grips with his successes and failures, as he struggles to return home and understand his son. VERDICT Mendelsohn's narrative is immediately engaging, soon gripping, and in the end, deeply moving. [See Prepub Alert, 3/20/17; Q&A with Mendelsohn on p. 119.-Ed.]-Thomas L. Cooksey, formerly with Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.