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A review by mattdube
The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason
4.0
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.
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.