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Title: The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Author: Zachary Mason
Narrator: Simon Vance
Format: Unabridged
Length: 4 hrs and 44 mins
Language: English
Release date: 02-02-10
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 43 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
Zachary Masons brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homers classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy.
With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homers original that, taken together, open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary work that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.
Editorial Reviews:
Here are 44 retellings of The Odyssey, short chapters that are like apocrypha for the dvd-commentary generation, a fractured mosaic waiting to be pieced back together. Many famous passages are retold several times over: Odysseus returns to Ithaca only to find it abandoned, and then again to find his wife a ghost, or married to an unfit man. In one story Achilles is a golem who slaughters indiscriminately, while Odysseus marries Helen or arranges her murder, becomes the author of The Odyssey itself, and comes face to face with a Trojan doppelganger. Each short chapter is just long enough to sketch a sideways look, but always leaving room for the author's psychologically astute sketches of key players including Penelope, Menelaus, and Agamemnon.
Rather than conveying ironic distance or playful manipulation, Simon Vances delivery is earnestly crisp and cautious; words are delivered with attack, almost declamatory like a classical oration, but managing to strike a balance with a more conversational tone, ensuring that each story leaves its impression, despite its brevity. His voice also carries more than a trace of weariness, befitting a tired traveller.
Zachary Masons debut novel has been praised for its post-modern approach to The Odyssey, yet Masons retelling is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the original, particularly Homer's approach to narrative (famously beginning in media res, and using flashbacks and storytelling to color in the backstory). In fact, Masons embellishments and visions seem to spring from the head of Homer wily Odysseus' inquiries into the nature of authorship, illusion, and truth belong to both authors. Odysseus the original unreliable narrator has waited a long time for a Borgesian makeover.
Only rarely does The Lost Books of the Odyssey fall into archness. And nor is it simply post-modern pastiche: there is soul here, too, and poetry. Mason's retellings bring out the ancient storys hidden truths, such as the innate isolation and heartbreak just under the surface of the Medusa myth. Cyclops' confrontation with Nobody is told from his point of view and the giant is even identified with Homer himself (both blind, both at the mercy of Odysseus). And the ending is lovely, wistful and sad, bemused and elegiac, and Vance delivers it as he does the rest of this short but beautiful book with elegance and ease. Dafydd Phillips
