The Lost Books of the Odyssey

by ZacharyMason (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $3.40

  In the plain outside the walls of Troy, Agamemnon demands a fortress. With no materials except a few trees and unlimited sand, the Greeks dig a negative image of a palace into the white plain: a vast, inverted castle soaring into the depths of the earth. 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; and, he comes back to find Penelope is dead. Made up of forty-four retellings of passages from Homer's Odyssey , Zachary Mason's book is a fictional apocrypha: a radical and thrilling renovation of classical legend. He uses Homer's linear narrative and explodes it: presenting fragments of alternative and contradictory re-takes and out-takes of the same familiar stories - 'The Trojan Horse', 'The Cyclops', 'Circe', 'The Sirens' - breaking them up and putting them together into new shapes. Turned inside-out, these stories become glosses, mirrors and mazes that explore and examine Odysseus' journey: allowing us to see it afresh, in all its ambition, sadness and futility. Reminiscent of Borges or the Calvino of Invisible Cities , The Lost Books of the Odyssey is elegant, allusive, provocative and utterly fascinating - and seems destined to become a modern classic.

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $30.91