Word: odysseus
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...Lost Books of the Odyssey,” Zachary Mason’s mesmerizing new novel, takes Odysseus’s homeward bound journey and riddles it with uncertainty. Ithaca could be the hero’s home or it could be an illusion. Odysseus himself may be the author of his own story; his heroic deeds could be merely his own invention. There’s no one end, no one story. Mason’s tale doesn’t just wander—it writhes...
Mason’s stories are brief and flavorful. In a short introduction to the book, he presents his vignettes as recently discovered fragments containing alternative versions of “The Odyssey.” One story has Odysseus (here named “Mr. O.”) living in a sanatorium, where he spends his days trying to remember a distant war. Another has him as Agamemnon’s prized assassin, faced with the unfortunate order of killing himself. Sticking with the pretext of fragmentation, Mason never fully fleshes out the action in each tale...
...mostly the book circles around the craft of truth itself. Mason is a computer scientist by training, and codes and mazes pattern his stories. In one tale, Theseus, famed conqueror of the Minotaur, slays the beast only to wander forever in a labyrinth. In another, sirens seduce Odysseus not through their beautiful tunes, but through the promise of wisdom. “As their songs crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that... behind everything... was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack,” the wily...
...continual beginnings of Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” and the distorted views of Venice in “Invisible Cities” find their match in Mason’s ever-refracted portrait of Odysseus. Both authors leave the reader with the task of sorting through their sketches. Like Calvino, Mason trades in shadows...
...colored cocktails and blasting American pop. For about $10 a day the young and hedonistic can float down the river, booze in hand, then stop by the pub for pizza or pancakes. The town, a recent returnee says, "is like the land of the lotus eaters, and you are Odysseus in an inner tube." (See TIME.com/travel for city guides, stories and advice...