Title The Lost Books of the Odyssey Series --- Author Zachary Mason Cover Art --- Publisher Farrar, Strauss and Giroux - 2010 First Printing 2007 Category Mythology Warnings None Main Characters Odysseus, Penelope Main Elements Gods Website ---

Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With hypnotic prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skills, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that, taken together, open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

The year is almost over, I've read a whole bunch of books about Troy and The Odyssey, did I really want to read one more? And one that looked like it would be some stuffy, hoity-toity literary exploration...but my library had it, it was short and I figured I could squeeze one more in.

Oh I was so wrong, I loved this book so much I want to run out and buy my own copy. The premise is that all myths come in many variations, told over the generations by word of mouth till one person (or persons), who was probably not actually called Homer, gathered it together and eventually the thing got written down and that version kind of stuck. Basically how the Bible came to be as well. But before that, there were a lot of other versions and variations and this book explores 44 of them.

Like what if Odysseus comes home and finds Penelope had actually remarried? Or Ithaka had been abandoned and was now overgrown? What if wolf-like Penelope has surrounded herself with a harem of suitors, but on hearing her husband has returned, quickly cleans up the evidence? Or what if, after 10 years of attempting to get home, he's drifting in the water, only to bump up against a boat, get pulled in by none other than Agamemnon, who accuses him of trying to go AWOL, only to start the Trojan War all over again.

Some of the tales are simple twists and what-if's. Others border on absurd, like a tale where Achilles had actually died before the war so Odysseus and Palamedes create a golem (that's Judaic mythology if you're wondering) and that explains why Achilles was so good on the battlefield and nearly impossible to kill. Or another one that feels like a Russian fairy tale, where Agamemnon sends Odysseus, Nestor, and someone else to go and write a book that contains all the information in the entire world, so they run off for a hundred years, come back, only to be told to go out there and find a single sentence that explains the entire world, and so forth.

Some of the tales are sad, some bizarre, some funny. Odysseus is quite the character really and he fits into this tales perfectly, which made some of the weirder ones (golem? werewolves?) almost make sense! To the point where you'd like the author to take that crazy idea and write an entire novel with that premise.