Snag The Lost Books Of The Odyssey Showcased By Zachary Mason Expressed As Print

destanının güncellenmiş düzyazı ile yazılmış modern bir düzenlemesi, Klasik Homerosun yerini çağdaş Homeros Zachary Mason almış, Hayalgücünü kullanarak Odysseusun öyküsünübölümde yeniden yazmış, En çok. bölüm “Kış Kitabını” sevdim, Çok keyifli bir okuma oldu, hayal gücümü canlandırdı, Sona doğru Achilleus ile Büyük İskendere yolculuk kitapta sürpriz bir bölümdü,

Bu kitabı okumak için Homerosun İlyada ve Odessa destanlarını okumak en azından geniş bir özetini bilmek gerekiyor, Hatta Truva filmini seyretmek bile yetebilir, Ancak bunlardan birtanesi hakkında dahi bilginiz yoksa kitabı okumayın, Yunan Mitolojisi ve Homeros Destanlarını sevenlere öneririm, underneath the cleverness and the copulating mirrors and the labyrinth architectureof which there's admirably muchthere's a melancholic source to all these odysseyreflecting tales victor of last year's penultimate starcherone fiction contest.
all its revelationsthe gods' winner's blues, the existential angst of the ancients, the mundane provenance of legendsare told with a wistful and appropriately epic heaviness.


how he wrings from the original more and more and more, . . and yet the world isn't exactly enlarged or reduced, . . i don't know exactly how to describe it, but the accomplishment is something like adding seemingly infinite perspectives to an unchanging object, . . calvino's invisible cities and queneau's exercises in style are close kin,

its main accomplishment how it shows us we are, even within our mortal limits, inexhaustible, its main drawback for me, that it goes on a touch too long and lets the illusion of inexhastibleness falter at the end, but that's a quibble. try it mikey you might like it, . . As a child I was obsessed with mythology, especially Ancient Egyptian, Norse and, of course, Greek, Every encyclopedia in my personal library which wasnt devoted to animals of all sorts was devoted to myths from all over the world, I used to own many of them I still do and cherish them that I dont do now, because in a way they were more than just books, cover, spine, paper they were stories cosily settled between the pages, doors to oh so many other worlds, centuries and cultures.
I enjoyed these stories so much that every myth related book now has to compete with them, Every new book has to prove its able to bring the same kind of pure, childish joy, And heres the problem with this particular book, I know Zachary Masons writing is for sure far more sophisticated than that of writers of myths collection for children, The point of view presented by an adult is inevitably more complicated than that of a child, The world painted with daring brushstrokes is much more intricate and manysided, That said, the problem with this book is the problem of my perception and expectation, I read The Lost Books of the Odyssey as a very good book which it is, closed it and found no sweet aftertaste, I'm left with calculated admiration of an adult who's come across one more very wellwritten book in her life.
This is a very nice series of riffs on different parts of the Odyssey, taking certain passages of the classic and reimagining them often times completely changing the context or speculating well into the future and beyond.
It is absolutely not a novel, rather a collection of whatif's, and Mason's love and thought put into the source material is obvious,

It is hard not to compare this to Borges, particularly in the more metafictional tales which I, of course, loved, To give you an example, in one story's nutshell, after Odysseus goes through his many trials, he is stunned to find the gods reconstructing everything so the whole thing can start over, and over, and on and on into possibly infinity, thus creating the similar but different interpretations of the tale that have survived to this day.
It's a nice twist, and Mason thankfully keeps all of these stories short, giving us just enough time to get it, and then ending it, leaving you at the last page with a sense of wonder and thoughtfulness.


Even though I compliment the shortness, some stories were TOO short, and the latter half of the book dropped in quality a bit as some ideas seemed not as fleshed out.
All in all, impressive stuff, but I find myself hoping Mason writes something soon that is completely independent of previous works, so we can see his imagination unleashed on his own creations.
Duru, sarih bir dili var, Bazı öykülerde üstkurmaca çok güzel kulanılmış, Gülümseten, ufuk açan, çok fazla duyduğumuz hikayelere tersten bakmamızı sağlayan birçok öykü var, Mesela Odyssesus'un kör ettiği kiklop kendi öyküsünü, Kalypso da kendi öyküsünü anlatabilme fırsatı yakalamış Zackary Mason sayesinde, Ama daha az öykü olsaymış, bu çok kuvvetli öykülerin etkisi daha güçlü olurmuş gibi geldi, Bir süre sonra birbirine çok benzeyen öyküler içinde bu parlak yıldızlar da silikleşip sönmeye başladı, zihnim dağıldı biraz.
This book confirmed for me why it's probably a good thing that Borges never attempted, to my knowledge, to write a novel, What works so splendidly in individual short stories the cool tone, provocative ideas combined with fascinating detail would've become tiresome over the course of a novel.
And that's exactly what happened as I progressed through Mason's book, I was quite delighted, even enchanted in the beginning, but then grew weary of the clever gamesmanship for its own sake, That I could see and I confess I didn't put much effort into sorting out connections the chapters didn't seem to build on each other or even resonate in any particularly associative or collagestyle fashion.
Still, there were individual chaptersstories that I found very engrossing, The final chapter summed up for me the delights and frustrations of the entire book: it presents an intriguing idea that places Odysseus in contemporary light of "celebrity" but this idea seemed to come out of nowhere.


In his NYer review see below comparingfictional takes on Greek myth by Mason, Malouf, and Banville Daniel Mendelsohn argues that the appeal of this genre is that, at its best, it provides new insights into ancient timeless stories that reinforce why such stories remain important and compelling to readers so many centuries later.
Between Mason and Malouf, for "Ransom," a reimagining of Priam's visit to Achilles to plead for return of Hector's body, Mason does a much better job of adding something new to our understanding of Homer's genius Banville was a distant third.
Though I haven't yet read Ransom, I think M's criticism of Mason is a valid one,

Still, despite all the misgivings, I think any fan of Homer or Greek mythology, would

consider Mason's book, if not a mustread, at least an intriguing riff on one of the great stories of all time.
If nothing else, Mason's "lapidary" prose is worth the effort, actually, I'm not even sure what that means slick, spare, but evocative, like stones worn smooth by water but professional reviewers seem to use it all the time, so I thought I'd throw it in there.
Anyway, M. writes fine, vivid sentences.


sitelink newyorker. com/arts/critics Ive never read the Odyssey or the Iliad my only knowledge of both comes third or fourthhand from cinema and literary references and so I was a little apprehensive about picking up this book.
As the title suggests, its a collection of stories mostly very short which purport to be a number of missing fragments from the Odyssey, To me it sounded like what a keen Classics scholar might produce over a few quiet weekends, something which might require a similar kind of specialist knowledge to access and enjoy.
But I couldnt have been more wrong,

What Mason has done with the story of Ulysses return to Ithaca is amazing, and one need only have a slight knowledge of the original to appreciate it.
The word that best describes it is haunting not only because the stories seem to possess a ghostly sensibility, but because for the author, the battleweary Ulysses is a man pursued and pursuing things halfforgotten, misremembered.
Adrift in time, the same story is told again and again except it is not the same: he meets Circe who is also Ariadne from the labyrinth of Minos Helen of Troy and his wife Penelope switch places he delivers ancient wisdom to Agamemnon, who rules over a negative image of a palace sunken underground in a great white plain.
Above all, the implication is that Ulysses himself was the hidden author of the Odyssey, and that so impossibly exaggerated and convoluted were the tales he told about himself and his companions that even Ulysses no longer understands where the truth begins.
Some would argue that this essential unreliability constitutes one definition of postmodernism,

I dont know whether any or all of what Mason writes about is hinted at in Homers originals, and I dont much care.
Because the writing is beautiful, Careful, articulate, never gratuitous, the book possesses a deeply mysterious imagist quality that I found incredibly affecting, People have compared the stories to Borges and Calvino, and this is certainly valid, but Mason is more pareddown, more abstract than both, Borges would have made poems from many of these tales, but while Masons prose seems formless by comparison, one has the sense of invisible structures at work even while the text seems totally insubstantial indeed, Mason has commented in interviews that he originally intended the book to be accompanied by an array of House of Leavesesque paraphernalia: an appendix, fauxcredentials, expanded footnotes, etc.
While Id be fascinated to see what happened to all that, I think he was probably right to cut it out,

One last thing: this isnt totally relevant to the work, but I was impressed to find that this first novel came from someone who wasnt previously an established author, or even a fulltime writer.
Mason now has a Wikipedia entry, but it lists his vocation as computer scientist before his career as author, In a time when most advice for wouldbe writers tends to demand an obsessive degree of commitment, I find it rather wonderful to think that an amateur writer can still produce something so beautifully crafted, so nearperfect in conception and execution.


I literally cannot think of a bad thing to say about this book, Five.

Most of what I now know about the Odyssey comes from studying James Joyces rendition of that story at university, I really think Joyce would have totally understood and enjoyed this book,

Not me, particularly, .