Reviewed: The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason
Reinventing the man of twists and turns.
Book Reviews
Odysseus was never at a loss for a story—or for a disguise. In the Cyclops’ cave he was Nobody; in Eumaeus’ hut, a Trojan; to Athena on Ithaca, a ruthless fugitive from Crete. Glib, watchful, quick with a lie, Odysseus is the original hoodwinking hero. Zachary Mason has taken that very equivocacy as a guiding principle for his first novel. In The Lost Books of the Odyssey, the man of twists and turns is all of the above and more: a coward, an ingrate, a doppelganger, a patient at a sanitarium, the inventor of Achilles, the lover of Helen, a reader of the Odyssey or its witting or unwitting author. Mason—computer programmer by day, revisionist mythologist by night—“retells” the epic in 44 episodes. Some episodes focus on a glossed-over scene from the 24-book original; some pose counterfactual dimensions. All involve a meticulous narrative refraction matched by the indelible precision of the prose—the language, at times, of myth. The book has been billed alternately as a hobbyist pastiche or a Borgesian mind-fuck; Mason, for his part, invokes Calvino and Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, and at points The Lost Books recalls both Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (a straight-narrative retelling whose language modernizes over the course of three acts) and Paul Bowles’ Points in Time (a series of disconnected, epigrammatic episodes that attempts a history of Morocco in just north of 100 pages). The real premise, meanwhile, is to engage the relationship between fiction and myth and the central weapon in Odysseus’ arsenal: the knowledge that whoever controls the story controls the war. Narrative threads unr... Continued
Fri. Mar. 5, 2010 - Thu. Mar. 11, 2010
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