⋙ [PDF] Free The Lost Books of the Odyssey A Novel Zachary Mason 9780374192150 Books

The Lost Books of the Odyssey A Novel Zachary Mason 9780374192150 Books

Download As PDF : The Lost Books of the Odyssey A Novel Zachary Mason 9780374192150 Books

The Lost Books of the Odyssey A Novel Zachary Mason 9780374192150 Books

This novel gives us a very different portrayal of characters familiar to readers of the Greek "myths". Agamemnon appears as a primary narrator. Hercules is not the hero we have been taught to respect even venerate. The old stories are refreshed by the change in perspective offered by this telling of their stories. If you love the Greek myths you will thoroughly enjoy this reimagining of the characters at their centers and of the events surrounding the struggle between the Hellenic states and their chief trading rival, Troy. Schliemann, relied on Homer's tales to help him locate Troy, which was then considered legend. He did, indeed, locate a site which revealed many layers of the ancient city of Troy. He identified the wrong level as the Troy of Homer's myths, and thereby destroyed much of that site. But it was real. It did exist. And Homer knew how to locate it. Men out of the myths. Well worth reading.


Tags : The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel [Zachary Mason] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV><DIV>A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER<BR><BR><DIV>Zachary Mason’s brilliant and beguiling debut novel,Zachary Mason,The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel,Farrar, Straus and Giroux,0374192154,Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology,Odysseus (Legendary character);Fiction.,AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY FICTION,American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +,FICTION Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Literary,Fiction-Fairy Tales, Folklore & Mythology,FolkloreMythology,GENERAL,General Adult,King of Ithaca (Mythological character),Literary,Literature: FolkloreMythology,Odysseus (Greek mythology),Odysseus,,United States

The Lost Books of the Odyssey A Novel Zachary Mason 9780374192150 Books Reviews

I am enjoying this book, but I find that the conceit quickly flagged, as did my interest. I do keep coming back to the stories - which are quite good - but this is not a book to be read in one sitting, or even in sequence alone. You need to take a break every know and then, and come back to it fresh (much as one has to do with the original source material!) A little bit at a time, over time, is the way to approach this book.
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."
Zachary Mason's "The Lost Books of the Odyssey" is a tour de force for devotees of the classical epics. The premise, delightfully conceived, is that a number of alternative accounts of the Trojan War and Odysseus' ill-fated journey home circulated in the ancient world, and that these tales were denigrated in favor of the official accounts that have been handed down to us in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Mason is our guide through these Gnostic gospels, surprising us nearly every step of the way.

Familiar stories are up-ended by being re-told from the point of view of the supposed villain, like Polyphemous and Medusa. Alternative explanations are given which challenge the traditional explanation for why things happened as they did. We are given rich character backstories which greatly enrich our understanding of their later actions. For anyone who has found themselves roaming before the walls of Troy or following Odysseus on his journey back to Ithaca, "The Lost Books of Odysseus" is an incredible treat which will remain with you long after you have put it down.

As an aside, Mason's command of language-- particularly the archaic --is considerable. Unless words like termagant, casuistry, and verdigrised roll of your tongue, you might want to either have a good lexicon by your side, or (like me) read this work on your , which allows for easy lookups without interrupting the flow of the narrative.
This novel gives us a very different portrayal of characters familiar to readers of the Greek "myths". Agamemnon appears as a primary narrator. Hercules is not the hero we have been taught to respect even venerate. The old stories are refreshed by the change in perspective offered by this telling of their stories. If you love the Greek myths you will thoroughly enjoy this reimagining of the characters at their centers and of the events surrounding the struggle between the Hellenic states and their chief trading rival, Troy. Schliemann, relied on Homer's tales to help him locate Troy, which was then considered legend. He did, indeed, locate a site which revealed many layers of the ancient city of Troy. He identified the wrong level as the Troy of Homer's myths, and thereby destroyed much of that site. But it was real. It did exist. And Homer knew how to locate it. Men out of the myths. Well worth reading.