The Lost Books of the Odyssey - Hardcover

Mason, Zachary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374192154 ISBN 13: 9780374192150

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010

Synopsis

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 10 years' journeying Odysseus returns to Ithaca. Each time he finds something different.

About this title

Review:

"A subtle, inventive and moving meditation on the nature of story and what Louis MacNeice calls "the drunkenness of things being various"." (John Banville)

"Mason ungrounds the Odyssey, often gorgeously, turning Homer's twisting tale into a sermon on indeterminacy. He 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." (The Los Angeles Times)

"

With one foot firmly planted in antiquity and one in the postmodern world, the book is an odd but well-balanced hybrid, the kind of work that's usually thrown off as a lark by an established writer toying with new forms, like Carlyle's Sartor Resartus or DeLillo's Valparaiso. All the more impressive that a debut author could create such a compelling curio.

" (James Crossley The Review of Contemporary Fiction)

"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. Rarely is it so reassuring to be in the hands of such an unreliable narrator." (Simon Armitage)

"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." (Michiko Kakutani The New York Times)

Book Description:

An extraordinary imagining of episodes, fragments and revisions of Homer's Odyssey, a book destined to become a modern classic.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0374192154
• ISBN 13: 9780374192150
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 228