Customer Reviews

The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel

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When the author gave his first reading of this book in New York he spoke about the book in clinical terms; its use of mathematical principles, the book as a study of recursion. But this book could not be less clinical. Though the tale is told in vignettes, each offers a different window into a sliver of the human condition with all its pain and drama and the emotions that motivate a human life.

A beautiful treatment not just of Odysseus, but also of Homer's other characters, the novel fleshes out these iconic figures so that they can be touched and tasted and felt.

In the Jewish tradition there is the idea of writing midrash -- stories that explain the tales from the bible by filling in the human connections between the lines. Mr. Mason has succeeded in writing very believable midrash on the Homeric epics which illuminate the text by giving us further angles by which to view.

I was privileged to see an early draft of Zachary Mason's Lost Books of the Odyssey, and I am delighted that this multi-talented young writer / scientist / athlete has found a publisher for the full, prize-winnning version. Fans of Jorge Luis Borges will find much to savor here, as will devotees of Neil Gaiman: Mason effortlessly blends the intricately imagined settings of the former with the pensive chill of the latter, to fresh and sometimes startling effect. I'll skip the hyperbole and superlatives that surround every notable fiction debut nowadays, and suggest that if you are a fan of the original, are hungry for skillful, soulful writing, or just looking for a good read, buy the Lost Books.

Unlike the Odyssey translations by poets Robert Fitzgerald and Richmond Lattimore, Zachary Mason's newly published version of The Odyssey takes a post-modernist approach--casual, playful, earthy, and even scatological. Using the traditional story of the Odyssey as his starting point, Mason gives his own take on various episodes from that epic, jumping around in time and place, changing major aspects of the story, adding new episodes, and providing unique points of view. Odysseus is not an epic hero here. Rather, he is an often arrogant man who loves killing, often acts cruelly, and even makes mistakes, a real man whom Athena abandons for part of the narrative.

In Mason's version of this epic, the story lines change. Odysseus himself vies for the hand of Helen and has some success in winning her. After the death of Achilles, Odysseus creates a golem of Achilles out of clay so that Achilles can keep fighting. He tells the tale of Polyphemus, the giant, from Polyphemus's point of view, that of a peaceful farmer who offers hospitality to the men whom he finds occupying his cave when he returns home, and the payment they give him. Mason gives several different accounts of Odysseus's return home (choose your favorite)-in one, Penelope is a "shade," a ghostly presence whom he cannot touch. In another, she has given up waiting for him and found another husband. At other times, she is described as still bedeviled by the suitors. In yet another, Odysseus returns to find his entire city abandoned.

Even Homer himself appears in this novel, lying in a hammock and dreaming of discovering a great book. Odysseus, on the other hand, actually finds a copy of the Iliad, written by the gods before the Trojan War, in Agamemnon's cabin on the ship. Gods and goddesses flit in and out, take the appearance of humans, play tricks, and have love affairs. Tightrope walkers, Alexander the Great, and even the doctors and nurses of a sanatorium appear and disappear.

Though some reviewers say that knowledge of the "real" Odyssey is not a prerequisite to the enjoyment of this book, all the humor depends on that knowledge. The ironies, absurdities, twists and turns, and shifts in point of view need the context of the original epic to have any meaning for the reader. Lovers of postmodern fiction, with its abandonment of boundaries and its open, free-for-all attitudes will find much to love in this novel, which looks at the Odyssey through a new lens. Mary Whipple

For those of us who come to novels expecting something more than a novel, who want graceful prose and intellectual rigor, who want to come away feeling as though we've discovered a world that is new and yet reminds us of the fictional worlds we love best, for those of us who are nearly always disappointed, Zachary Mason's Lost Books is an exception.

His sentences are lithe and muscular, and his project is large -- he will make you return to the Odyssey to be sure you haven't remembered it incorrectly, and, perhaps most astonishingly, he will change the way you remember the Odyssey.

I have long believed that, in Eliot's words, "a new work of art ... is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it," but it's been a long time since I watched a contemporary author do this with such grace. In addition to its austere, sometimes poetic beauty, in addition to the play with text and form and time, Lost Books is that rare synthesis of big ideas and small, gorgeous moments.

Put Lost Books on the shelf beside Borges, Calvino and Homer. It merits rereading and rereading.

Rarely does a book come along that is so engaging and so impressive that I wish I'd written it. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is one of those books. I have read and taught The Odyssey every year for the last 10 years, and my students and I never get tired or bored with the text as we do with so many others. When I discovered Zachary Mason's beautiful "followup" (for lack of a better term and since novel is a complete misnomer), I approached it with trepidation. I had found Kazantzakis's Modern Sequel to be worth more effort than the payoff (though Borges' and Calvino's followups were astoundingly good). But Mason came through and how!!!

Each stand alone story is a marvelously constructed "what if", "this is the reality", or "then next" tale that explores all the ins and outs of The Odyssey. Mason does an amazing job at imaginatively constructing or reconstructing the central themes and/or characters from the original. They can be read on their own, in conjunction with The Odyssey, or as a loosely connected series. However you read them, you will love them and be amazed at their lucidity and ability to be both beautiful and thought-provoking. I wish I'd written this book.

It's been a long time since I've read a book this well-conceived and satisfying: more emotionally invested then House of Leaves, far more human then Borges' Labyrinth, this twisted series of stories reinvent a whole new reality for Odysseus and in so doing, proposes a new notion of history and reality altogether. The book reads quickly but each story has layers to come back to over and over again. I suspect I've only just scratched the surface of Mason's clever construct: the last story, Endless City, is structured like a Mobius strip where the beginning and the end loop endlessly into an infinity structure and where a tale is told within a tale, within a tale, within a tale... The whole book can be read the same way, from beginning to end, from end to beginning, and with overlaps in the middle forming alternative meanings, yet its mathematical structuring takes nothing from the humane portrait of Odysseus as essentially a man lost in his own cunning, caught by the threads of the very lies he weaves to survive. It's a beautiful book, one that has renewed my passion for fiction. A+++

I got this book in the mail a couple of days ago and just finished it today. I recommend it to all readers! Amazon doesn't have the full description and reviews of the book, which I found on the publisher's websites: <http://www.starcherone.com/odyssey/> and <http://www.atlasbooks.com/marktplc/02025.htm>. I generally find back cover reviews to be overstatements, but in the case of Mason's The Lost Books, "elegantly written, frequently beautiful" seems almost an understatement.

The Lost Books consists of 46 chapters plus an introduction and an appendix. Each chapter is a complete short story in itself, and together they form a much more complicated story or set of stories. I'm not yet at the level to fully appreciate all of the hidden literary references and theories of artificial intelligence the author allegedly employs (as mentioned in the summary at one of the above websites), but the sheer beauty of the language made the book a delightful and thoughtful read. Even if you're not a fan of Nabokov, Borges, etc., you'll still like the book if you, like me, simply enjoy beautifully written short stories with lingering aftertastes---a word, a thought, an emotion, an image, a puzzle, or a revelation... The chapters rarely exceeds 10 pages, and many are no longer than 1 or 2 paragraphs. A few of my favorite stories include: The Other Assassin, Epiphany, Ocean's Disc, The Book of Winter, Decrement, Penelopy's Elegy, and Fox. I look forward to reading it again (perhaps many more times) for new discoveries.

This book is a rare combination of disciplined perfection and unbound imagination.

I can't say enough good things about this book. The vignettes resonate with life and offer unique (and, often, challenging) perspectives into The Odyssey of Homer. I will be recommending this one to all of my mythology loving friends. Hell, I'll be recommending it to any friend who reads books. Well done, Mr. Mason. I look forward to your next project.

This is the most original book I've read since that novel from the `80s--by Robbe-Grillet?-- that was published in unbound pages that you were supposed to shuffle up, so that every reader read a different story. I wondered why The Lost Books of the Odyssey was called "A Novel" on the cover, when it seemed to be a collection of fragments, or short stories, related but contradictory. Reading this book is like going into the labyrinth without Ariadne's thread. I was disoriented, lured into dead-ends, and annoyed by the seemingly pointless anachronisms. It wasn't until I came out at the end--or rather when the labyrinth finally crumbled into ruin--that I realized I actually had read a novel after all. A strangely moving one.
In musical terminology the chapters could be read as variations on a theme (the Odyssey), or mathematically as a series of permutations. The book could also be thought of as an illustration of the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which says that every possible outcome to every event exists in its own history, so that everything that could possibly happen in our universe, but doesn't, does happen in some other universe. But what makes it a novel is that it somehow creates a sum over all these possibilities. It's like a diagram of Richard Feynman's Principle of Least Action, in which the photons in a beam of light go off in all kinds of crazy directions, even backward in time, and only when the beam hits its target does it seem to have obeyed the familiar laws of physics.
One of the best doppelganger stories I've read -it could take its place beside Poe's and Dostoevsky's--is Mason's Chapter 3, "The Stranger," which ends like this: "Sometimes my mind will go with you as I tend to my duty here--of the two of us I think that you, freed from necessity, are the happier." The only necessary world is the one we live in.

In another chapter the Cyclops wrote the Odyssey. In another, Odysseus ends up in a nursing home, suffering from Alzheimer's. In another, Achilles is a golem. In chapter 42 the Iliad and the Odyssey are records of a chess game. In another, sick of the sea, Odysseus, anticipating Melville's Ishmael, puts an oar over his shoulder and walks inland until nobody knows what he's carrying.
The anachronisms are annoying at first because they contradict the premise stated in the preface--that these variations are translations from "a pre-Ptolemaic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus." We then read of an ancient book of a thousand pages compiled for Agamemnon (codex books weren't invented until the 1st century A.D.), which includes a chapter about "every whole number from zero up to the largest number that had yet been conceived of by men." Zero had not yet been conceived by men at that time. It was invented in India in the 9th century A.D., some 1800 years after Homer, and the term "whole number" wouldn't have any meaning for Greeks until the time of Pythagoras, maybe seven or eight centuries after the Trojan War. (Surely, I thought, a "Professor of Paleomathematics," as Mason called himself in the first version of the book, would know this!)
And then Odysseus and his crew are practicing celestial navigation, "but our calculations were never in agreement." Even if they had had numbers to calculate with, the stars were used only for direction until the Arabs invented astronavigation in the 7th century A.D. Odysseus also encounters steel cables, white noise, Confucius and Sun Tzu's Art of War, to name only a few historical violations. All these anachronisms would have been fine if it hadn't been for the premise. I hope Mason does away with the Preface altogether in the next edition.

But all is forgiven as the voyage nears its end and we realize that there is a protagonist, a hero, but he is not Odysseus. Someone, call him Nobody (as Odysseus called himself, meaning Everyman), maybe a war veteran, is recalling his life, in disguise, asking himself, "What if ...?" It's as if Nobody is writing down-- in the words of Athena in Chapter 36--"the metaphors with which I describe myself, like a hand trying to grasp itself by reaching into a mirror." This is an allusion to recursion, which Mason claimed was the mathematical basis of his book : infinite regress. Or is it infinite regret? It's really a novel about possibility and necessity: the lost books of the self.
The writing is often almost painfully lyrical. "Somewhere," Odysseus says to himself near the end, "I must have made a mistake. Turned down the wrong street, opened the wrong door, failed to make a sacrifice when the god was willing. And now I am old and not far from nothing, and everything I knew has turned to smoke."

Riffing off traditional myths and legends is a popular pastime nowadays; if done with panache, such a riff might even turn into a best-selling novel, a Broadway smash, or a Disney film. Or, in the case Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a profoundly delightful hall-of-mirrors collection of prose-poems based on Homer's two epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey--though in spirit, the book conforms more closely to The Odyssey, for the wily Greek wanderer Odysseus is at the center of nearly every riff that Mason lays down for us.

The tales are sliced up into 44 easily digested chapterlettes, each with a unique point of view, voice, and alternate-reality take on Odysseus' famous adventure. What astonishes me about Mason's work is how easily he slips back and forth between a contemporary storyteller's bag of tricks and that of the ancient bard Homer himself. The Odyssey, more than any other epic tale I can think of, is suited to this sort of literary legerdemain because Odysseus, being a direct descendent of Hermes, god of thieves and liars, excels in occupying more than one identity--he's a king, a beggar, a general, a nobody, a trickster, a washed-up prisoner of love, faithful husband and father, and revengeful lord. He's supremely confident yet consumed by doubts, talks to gods yet identifies with the commonest of his shipmates--in short, Odysseus is so full of contradictions, doubles, and slippery escape routes that is it any wonder we're still in love with him after over two millennia?

Mason exploits all this and more. His is a wonderfully fluid style; reading this book is like taking a dip in one's favorite swimming hole (or ocean). The words shimmer on the page and evoke both the dreamlike mind of Odysseus and the evocative mind of the storyteller as sorcerer. The closest thing I've read to it is another favorite novel of mine, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo, in an extended conversation with Ghengis Khan, describes fantastic cities he's seen on his voyages. Just as with Invisible Cities, the more fantastical Lost Books becomes, the more they ironically find their mark in the heart of the modern reader.

That's not to say that everything Mason touches is perfect. At times his voice turns a bit too modern for my taste, or in trying to execute a clever twist at the end of a tale he stretches too far. I'm also not sure what criteria he used for his footnotes. But believe me, these are minor. For someone willing to take on Homer like this, I can forgive a few awkward moments.

So am I telling you to read this book? Of course not--I'm telling you to read it and then read it again! Even if you're not an Odyssey freak and pick up all the subtle nuances, this is a book to treasure.