I remember, once, I reviewed for Bob Silvers the movie Troy. When I started, I had this idea that I wanted to use the structure of the Odyssey as a kind of framework, but it took more figuring out than I had realized. Yet you handle everything deftly.ĭANIEL MENDELSOHN: That’s a relief to hear, because it took a very long time to write this book.

You’re moving in and out of multiple stories, scales, and temporalities. But before delving into that, can you describe the process of figuring out the structure of the book? There are multiple story arcs happening simultaneously. It was beautiful and breathtaking, opening up many questions about knowledge and ways of knowing the world. RAJAT SINGH: Thank you for making the time to speak with me. Mendelsohn’s intelligence glitters not only on the page but also in conversation.

On a summer day, punctuated by thunderstorms, Mendelsohn invited me to his home in Rhinecliff, New York, to discuss An Odyssey, the Odyssey, and our mutual admiration for the classics. The book that grew out of those weeks in the classroom and on the road is a dazzlingly rich story of identity and recognition. The course, and the cruise retracing Odysseus’ voyage to Ithaca a few months later, set in motion an emotional journey neither man could have anticipated. When his father enrolled in Mendelsohn’s undergraduate Odyssey seminar at Bard College, where he teaches literature, Mendelsohn didn’t know that this would provide him with the makings of a book - nor did he know that his father would only have a year to live. Each new finding is more unsettling, but ultimately more interesting. Indeed, his entire oeuvre may seem to circle the same themes, but with each new foray, Mendelsohn discovers deeper truths about those we think we know, including ourselves. A contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Mendelsohn has already published two notable memoirs, The Elusive Embrace and The Lost. DANIEL MENDELSOHN - exacting critic, award-winning memoirist, aesthete - has written the book he says he “always had to end up writing.” An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, out this week from Knopf, is a heartfelt account of the reaches to which Mendelsohn goes, through text and time, to know his father.

An odyssey mendelsohn