Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate - Softcover

Mendelsohn, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0008518033 ISBN 13: 9780008518035

Publisher: William Collins, 2022

Synopsis

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year.

‘Astounding’ Sebastian Barry

‘A masterpiece’ Ayad Akhtar

‘This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise’
Jonathan Lethem

In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.

Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself.

Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul.

Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus – a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years – resulted in his banishment.

And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.

Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Mendelsohn is a prize-winning writer and critic. His books include the international best seller The Lost, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many others; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and two collections of essays. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Collins
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0008518033
• ISBN 13: 9780008518035
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128