Fatherand son bond overanepic adventure
An Odyssey: A Father, A Son And An Epic Daniel Mendelsohn
Homer’s Odyssey is a poem filled with disguises and trickery: it appears to be an adventure story, whose hero Odysseus blinds a one-eyed giant, sees his men turned into pigs by a sorceress, and battles his way past sea monsters and whirlpools before he finally reaches Ithaca. But it is also a story about storytelling and the fractured connections between reality and narrative.
Daniel Mendelsohn teaches a course on The Odyssey at the appropriately named Bard College in New York. A few years ago, his father Jay, then 81, decided he would like to sit in on Mendelsohn’s seminars. A cynical, unemotional scientist, Jay is a tough audience for literary criticism: ‘He looked around the table. “What kind of leader loses all his men? You call that a hero?” The students laughed out loud… Since I wanted to show them I was a good sport, I smiled broadly. But what I was thinking was,
‘What kind of a hero loses all his men? You call that a hero?
“This is going to be a nightmare.”’
Happily, Mendelsohn’s misgivings are not fully realised, though his father is rarely an easy person to have in his class. Classics has been a bridge between the two men before: Jay studied Latin at school but gave up before he was able to read The Aeneid, Virgil’s great epic poem. He tries to pick it up again after he retires but finds Virgil too dense and difficult. ‘Oh well,’ Mendelsohn said. ‘It was so long ago.’ To which Jay replied: ‘It’s okay. Now you’ll read it for me.’
And so, what begins as a memoir of the final years of Mendelsohn’s father, and this strange rapprochement they achieve through a poem, becomes something cleverer, more nuanced and touching. As Mendelsohn unpicks the stories of his father’s life he finds constant parallels between their relationship and that of Odysseus and his son Telemachus. After reading the poem, they go on a cruise, following the route taken by Odysseus on his journey home from Troy. And it is here that the book is most poignant. Jay reveals himself to be a warm and delightful travel companion. It produces a deeply moving finale to an exquisitely written book about fathers and sons, life and grief.