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“The 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...
Mason’s task is a bold one. After all, few read Homer’s “Odyssey” with the nagging feeling that something is missing from the story, and the epic is a touchstone for tales of travel and homecoming. As early as the...
But Mason is himself a bold writer, and “The Lost Books” moves deftly and confidently out of the realm of adaptation into its own imagined ground. His sentences, brawny and lithe, add their own muscle to Homer’s verse. “When...
At times, Mason takes up the epic’s loose ends, giving voice to Homer’s minor characters. The Cyclops, who in Homer’s tale finds himself blinded and beguiled by Odysseus’s wit, tells his own account of the hero?...
Also like Calvino, Mason prefers puzzles to set truths. For that reason, his novel goes beyond a simple adaptation of a classic text. In his essay “Why Read the Classics?” Calvino once wrote, “A classic is a book which with each...