The Lost Books of the Odyssey

"Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey picks up the notion that even within these ancient texts, the authors are envisioning possibilities for alternate universes of text. The premise is that there are other books of The Odyssey , aside from the canonical 24, which were lost – as so much classical literature is. This is the way in which he opens up a space to adapt it, and a lot of it is very ingenious. In one of the episodes, someone comes to in a frozen landscape and gradually, by reading The Odyssey , realises that he is Odysseus and has forgotten who he is. That’s a very sophisticated play on a passage of The Odyssey itself, in which Odysseus claims to be “nobody” or “no man”, in order to protect himself and conceal his identity. So it’s a further imagining of something for which there is already a scene in Homer’s text. There’s one – which I don’t think very much of – where he comes back home to Ithaca, Penelope is not quite what he hoped, and he leaves. But that’s already in Tennyson and Dante, the idea that Odysseus doesn’t want to go home, he wants to keep travelling. There’s another very clever one where he envisions The Iliad as having begun as a chess manual. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but it’s all very Odyssean, because playing with the text is already in original. The Odyssey is about endless travel, and also about narrative and how you fill it up. Maybe that is why it keeps being adapted. Ulysses is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. It’s the one that naturally we all think of, and it’s the ultimate recasting of the classic – in a very self-conscious way. It’s called Odysseys: Adventures in Reading the Greeks , and is a travel narrative interwoven with reflections on the meanings of the greatest hits of the classics – nothing abstruse or rare, all the ones people want to know about. It’s based on travels I’ve been making with my dad around sites associated with these different works, and the platonic exchange and discussion between me, a humanist, and my father, a scientist, about what we think the texts are about. We go to Troy, to Calypso’s cave, to the entrance to the underworld. It’s near Naples, where so many underworld activities take place. I hope not."