An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

"So this is the other book of the six that was, I’d say, the most beautifully written. Daniel Mendelsohn is a teacher of classics at Bard College on the East coast of the US and is a great fan of Homer’s Odyssey . He’s teaching a class on the Odyssey and his 82-year-old father decides to join the class with all these 18- and 19-year-olds. It becomes an exploration of his relationship with his father. It becomes an exploration of Homer’s Odyssey, which you get to know a lot about. It becomes an exploration of how Homer’s Odyssey , being a great human narrative, like all great human narratives applies to our lives today as much as it ever did. Therefore it’s a reaffirmation of the importance of not just the storytelling, but of classics as well. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So it’s all those things, and it’s rather beautiful. At the end, his father dies. Probably his father was slightly crusty and didn’t always express his emotions—as is often the case between fathers and sons. But in the final years of his life he got to know his father really well. He did something really important before his father died. Not really, because most of it takes place in New York in the class. But towards the end of the book he does go on one of these Hellenic tours—I can’t remember off hand but I think Daniel Mendelsohn may even be lecturing on the cruise—and that is part of the book and part of the bonding between him and his father. That’s towards the end. So the Odyssey can literally refer to the cruise they take together, but it refers more to the exploration of his relationship with his father."