A Great Book

I just read Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, published in September 2017. I am reading it again, because it was such fun for me the first time, and it is rich enough that it easily bears a second, immediate reading. It’s based on the author’s 81-year-old father sitting in on a seminar the author taught on the Odyssey by Homer and their subsequent Mediterranean cruise with the same theme. The story combines literary criticism with memoir, and features classic-style digressions into philology (with wonderful examples of etymology), philosophy, family history, flashbacks and flash forwards so that the book mirrors the epic on which it’s all based.

I love to know the end from the beginning, and that is what you get here. Before you read twenty pages you already know that Dan’s father takes Dan’s Odyssey seminar and that afterwards they go on a theme cruise based on the wanderings of Odysseus. You know how the epic begins and how it relates to the Iliad. You know its story and ending. You know about Dan’s three brothers and one sister and their families, about his “parenting partner” Lily and their two sons. You know that Dan’s father falls at the next Thanksgiving, and he has a stroke just a year after the start of that seminar. You review the story of Agamemmon, of Achilles, and of Troy. You learn what a proem is and how it functions in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and how the proem in the Aeneid looks back at both the earlier epics and their archetypes. You know about Dan’s paternal grandfather, his wife and children, and his death. You know about some of the journeys of Dan and his father and his family.

And then you learn about circles. In a completely wonderful sequence, you get a philological lesson in “moving through geographical space from one point to another” (p 20). Here are two paragraphs that made me know that this book was written for me:

“Voyage,” for instance, derives from the Old French voiage, a word that comes into English (as so many do) from Latin, in this case the word viaticum, “provisions for a journey.” Lurking within viaticum itself is the feminine noun via, “road.” So you might say that “voyage” is saturated in the material: what you bring along when you move through space (“provisions for a journey”), and indeed what you tread upon as you do so: the road.

“Journey,” on the other hand—another word for the same activity—is rooted in the temporal, derived as it is from the Old French jornée, a word that traces its ancestry to the Latin diurnum, “the portion for a day,” which stems ultimately from dies, “day.” It is not hard to imagine how “the portion for the day” became the word for “trip”: long ago, when a journey might take months and even years—say, from Troy, now a crumbling ruin in Turkey, to Ithaca, a rocky island in the Ionian Sea, a place undistinguished by any significant remains—long ago it was safer and more comfortable to speak not of the “voyage,” the viaticum, what you needed to survive your movement through space, but of a single day’s progress. Over time, the part came to stand for the whole, one day’s movement for however long it takes to get where you’re going—which could be a week, a month, a year, even (as we know) ten years. What is touching about the word “journey” is the thought that in those olden days, when the word was newborn, just one day’s worth of movement was a significant enough activity, an arduous enough enterprise, to warrant a name of its own: journey. (pp 20–21)

From this marvelous treatise, which continues beyond what I’ve quoted, the author introduces the concept of ring composition, a classical way of structuring a tale to include explanations, digressions, flashbacks and flash forwards that all come back to the main thread of the tale, enriching and enlightening its hearers or readers about the main theme. The Odyssey is structured this way, and so is this book. Every chapter includes its parts of the whole: the Odyssey, Dan’s father’s impact on that seminar and subsequent cruise, Dan’s relationships, his father’s relationships, all linked back to the main themes of the epic itself and telling the tale of fathers and sons, of husbands and wives.

I love that he gives us not only the subjects covered in the seminar, but the things the students say and what he says, and what he had planned to present on the days he didn’t get to cover everything he wanted to. It gives the reader the pleasures of the seminar too.

I love that the cruise is described not so much in terms of a travelogue, but of Dan’s observations of his father’s experience of the cruise.

I love that Dan analyzes his family minutely. I’m always fascinated by what makes up family relationships, and since that is one of his main themes, he spends considerable time on it. This is such an interesting family, too!

The parallels between Dan’s family and the story of Odysseus are interestingly developed, and so carefully crafted as to minimize the obvious disconnect—there is no warrior journeying home in Dan’s family—but there is the need of a son to come to know his father, and of a father to come to know his son, and of the son to come to recognize that the father knew him all along.

Like I said, I am reading this again along with the Odyssey itself. Maybe someday I will figure out my parents and my children. Until then, I journey through books such as this.