نمیدونم این کتاب هم وارد تزم بشه یا نه اما ایده‌های خوبی داشت و هیچی نشده سر و شکلی به افکارم داد. همه اپیزودها خوب نبودن و از هم گسستگی بین روایت‌ها شاید یکم اذیت‌کننده باشه، اما فصل‌های جذاب کتاب واقعا خوندنی‌ان.

If you like the story of The Odyssey, pick up this book, the retelling of the different tales are well-written and interesting. They are unfortunately a few moments where I was a bit confused, because the narratives changes from one chapter to the next, but it does not impair the whole quality of the book.

Very interesting and unique read. I picked this up on a whim because I enjoy Greek mythology and had never heard of this title or of the alternate tales of Odysseus. I was happy to discover this caught my attention right away. A few of the stories, if they can be called that, were just fine but most were great.

I really wanted to love this book. I audited a course a few years ago, to finally force myself to read the major epics, and fell in love with them. The Odyssey has one of the best paragraphs in literature. About the joy a happy marriage brings, something about friends rejoicing and foes repining 'but the truth of it all is with her and him.' Sigh. Lovely. But Odysseus was always a bit of a troubling character to me, his men dying for him while he protects himself, long affairs while he's, um, trying to get home to the wife that must remain faithful to be valued?, deliberately provoking the gods, etc. But, Homer infuses him with enough wit and charm to at least make you want to see how things turn out, and somehow you still like him, even though he butchers people with reckless abandon on his return (the suitors were jerks, okay, but the maids?-see The Penelopiad). This book is cold. The female characters are boring (or out of left field- Ariadne becomes Calypso?? What?? It just didn't work for me. One traitorous macho Greek dickhead left me, I'll just hang out here and hope another comes along?) and Odysseus is cold, cold, cold. The writing is lovely, I had to open my dictionary 50 times-refulgent is a good thing, and oubliette is a dungeon of some kind-which to me is fun, and he has done a remarkable job of capturing the feel of the epics, but just the syntax, not the charm.

I did like 'the Iliad of Odysseus', where he spends the last battle of the Trojan war hiding in a supply tent. Then he heads down the coast masquerading as a bard. When asked why he has a sword, and no lute, he claims he lost the lute, but the sword knows songs like "Feint to the heart then cut the hamstring," and "Throw sand in the eye and stab the sword hand." Funny. But it's the only one I really enjoyed. When I read The Iliad I always had an image in my head of Odysseus rolling his eyes while Achilles and Agamemnon swaggered about. Waiting for them to stop huffing and puffing so he could figure out how to win the wretched war and go home. This story reminded me of that. A few others came close, but on the whole I was disappointed. Never really bored, but never really engaged either.

I didn't like the Achilles as golem story, which is a shame, as it's the perfect explanation for a character I always hated. He has no mind of his own, it all makes sense now!

And I hate footnotes (thank you David Foster Wallace). Even when they are faux.

Hector rules.

If I had a goodreads shelf called "books I wish I had written", this book would be on it. What a great idea! Any excuse to revisit The Odyssey works for me, but I really enjoyed the author's explorations of plot and character. I don't LOVE epic poetry, though, and I think he was trying to capture that style, line upon line of adjectives and metaphors:

"Within, nothing. Moss on the dung-heap and disintegrating potsherds. A dog's verdigrised brass collar clanked underfoot. The house was cold and still. As he crept down a corridor, he looked back, saw his footprints in the dust and desiccated leaves, and discarded stealth."

Still, I'd be happy to read this again.

Not really a novel. A collection a short stories and thoughts based on the Odyssey. Alternate endings, familiar stories but from a different character's view, that sort of thing. I enjoyed it very much.

This book, a collection of "inserts" into the canonical Odyssey of Homer, is nearly as good as the press. It takes selected moments of the Odyssey, more or less, and reimagines them-- so we get the Cyclops story from the POV of the cyclops, etc. It's the more where it gets interesting, though: a chapter about Odysseus' courtship of Penelope is weird and wonderful and almost makes you think you just never heard this part of the story before. Another chapter somehow connects the Odyssey with Theseus encounter with the minotaur and Ariadne. It's got all kinds of interesting things happening, and at times pulls off a dangerously successful approximation of Homer's high style-- which means, in essence, there are moments when my mind wandered and I feel like the conceit, in the actual defined sense, left my brain and I was just confused-- dangerous in that way, where I zoned out the same way I do when I read the actual Odyssey.

There are also, of course, pastiches of other authors-- "Endless City," which I think is the last of the stories here, reads a lot like Calvino or maybe Borges. There are also lots of other weird nods in the direction of other writers. It's a book that's probably not read best all the way through, but of course that's how I, and I suspect most readers, will encounter it at least the first time through.

My favorite part of the book might be the fake intro, telling the story of the lost books and referring to the likely real field of mathematics called "combinatrics" or something like that. These sections are presented, at least in the intro (the conclusion is a little less convincing) in perfect academese, and they are funny and mind-blowing in their content. There is, maybe unfortunately, a suggestion there about how to order the books, on the basis of what key terms they engage, that the book actually doesn't follow through on-- I kind of wish it had. The order of stories to me was somewhat arbitrary, in the sense that I don't think they worked together all that well, and I feel like that's one area in which this book could've been improved. But mostly, I found it a delight to read and think about. It's one I'll probably buy a copy of, too, so I can read parts of it again.

This wasn’t at all what I was expecting. It turns out to be 44 Italo Calvino-like alternative riffs on episodes in the Odyssey and the Iliad, ranging from a paragraph to a few pages. We meet many different versions of Odysseus, but whether hero or coward he’s still recognisably the crafty, devious person who’s always been my favourite character.

The stories are variable, but when they’re good they’re very good. Excellent writing, and imaginative and unexpected turns, with some laugh out loud moments. I especially liked the one where Achilles dies from a snake bite and Odysseus, who has been ordered to recruit him at all costs, constructs a golem. It convinces, but is rather limited in its actions, sometimes accidentally killing its own side.

At Troy, Patroclus shared a tent with Achilles and it was widely assumed that they were lovers. In fact, Achilles was tireless, endlessly biddable and intelligent enough to cook, mend and polish, which allowed Patroclus to live in the indolent luxury he craved.

In another, Odysseus turns up at Troy but manages to avoid most of the combat. After the war he pretends to be a bard, making up stories of heroism (by both himself and others). After ten years of this he gives up and goes home, and is gratified when bards turn up and sing versions of his own tales back to him. The book ends with a vision of Troy as a tourist trap. I really recommend it if you are obsessed with retellings of Greek myth

Beautiful prose with some standout chapters, but overall I felt like many stories were missing something.