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I saw an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn about his new book “An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic” and thought it sounded intriguing. This book is a memoir, but in many ways, it is three stories intertwined. The author provided a summary of “The Odyssey”, along with his account of the class he teaches at Bard College and the relationship with his father and how he and his father interacted with the students when his father decided to audit the class.The book is well written but meanders a bi...
This is the moving story of a man and his father, worlds apart in many ways and now trying to join spiritually in an understanding of one another. The writing is intelligent, descriptive, and insightful, very readable and often novel-like in its explorations of people, places, and events. Peppered all throughout are instructive explanations of The Odyssey - its themes, its structure, its importance in history and literature. Indeed, there are stirring exhortations to study the Classics not only
This wonderful revisit of Homer's The Odyssey is all the more enjoyable due to the author's poignant interweaving of recollections of his relationship with his emotionally distant father. Daniel Mendelsohn, a Classics professor at Bard College, learns much about his father when the senior Mendelsohn sits in on his son's freshman course on The Odyssey. Just as Telemachus learns much about his father through narratives told by those he meets on his journey, Mendelsohn learns much about his father
Stealth literary criticism. Part classics course, part father-son memoir, part travelogue. Doctor Mendelsohn’s is clearly the voice of a Professor of Classics. There’s no smoothly swirling Rothian prose here. The rigor of his voice may be explained as we learn more about his austere father who believed nothing worth doing should be easy. Might that include the writing or reading of this moving memoir? The father, Jay, takes his son’s Odyssey seminar at Bard College one spring. Then the two take
I listened to "An Odyssey" while journeying home from a family holiday gathering. It was the ideal companion to my own 2-day road trip. On its face the book presents a detailed review of the archetypal hero's journey, told from the perspective of an aging Classics professor conducting a seminar with a classroom of aging teens, and his octogenarian father. The subject is Odysseus' epic return to his island kingdom and to three generations of family at the end of the Trojan War. These distinct bio...
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn is a combination of literary criticism of Homer’s Odyssey, a family memoir, and a travelogue. This is a unique and fascinating combination that Mendelsohn skillfully weaves together by transitioning seamlessly from one genre to another.The literary criticism occurs when Daniel Mendelsohn, a Classics professor, conducts a seminar on Homer’s Odyssey. He analyzes the text with his students, providing insights and interpretations that ill...
I read this five months ago as part of my preparation for an exciting group read of Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Odyssey.As so often happens with books I deeply appreciate, I mean to re-read, take detailed notes and then write a considered review. And then, as also often happens, my reading and my life move on and I don’t get back to the book that gave me so much.When I finished Mendelssohn, I promised myself and GR that I would write a thoughtful, referenced review, and began the notin...
What a fantastic book! What an original idea! The author taught an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey and his Father aged eighty-one asked to sit on it. This story chronicles both the workshop, a trip based on the Odyssey that Daniel Mendelsohn took with his dad, and the relationship between father and son. The outcome is an immensely satisfying book that is intellectually and emotionally stimulating and beautifully written. He uses long sentences when he talks about the voyage and the Odyssey...
Mendelsohn has been passionate about the classics, so much so that it is he teaches it at Bard College. One year his eighty-one-year-old father, Jay, decides that he will sign up and join the young people learning about this epic tale for the first time. Jay is a retired research scientist who was a maths expert but realises that this is his one last chance to discover about the great literature of the world, something that he didn’t do when he was being educated. So, begins an emotional adventu...
