The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

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 ten years' journeying Odysseus returns, again and again, to Ithaca. Each time he finds something different: his patient wife Penelope has betrayed him and married; his arrival accelerates time and he watches his family age and die in front of him; he walks into an empty house in ruins; he returns but is so bored he sets sail again to repeat his voyage; he comes back to find Penelope is dead. Made up of forty-four retellings of passages from Homer's Odyssey, Zachary Mason's book is a fictional apocrypha: a radical and thrilling renovation of Classical legend. He uses Homer's linear narrative and explodes it: presenting fragments of alternative and contradictory re-takes and out-takes of the same familiar stories - the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens - breaking them up and putting them together into new shapes. Turned inside-out, these stories become glosses, mirrors and mazes that explore and examine Odysseus's journey: allowing us to see it afresh, in all its ambition, sadness and futility. Reminiscent of Borges or the Calvino of Invisible Cities, The Lost Books of the Odyssey is elegant, allusive, provocative and utterly fascinating - and seems destined to become a modern classic.

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 *

Zachary Mason is the author of the New York Times bestsellingnovel The Lost Books of the Odyssey and, more recently, Void Star, which has been optioned for film.He lives in California.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780224090223
ISBN 10	0224090224
Title	The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Author	Zachary Mason
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	2010-05-06
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable