![]() ![]() In deciding to take his son's class, Mendelsohn pere tends to dominate the exchanges. With great narrative craft he manages to illuminate text through the cut and thrust of the student-teacher dialogue, and to train that light on the theme of fathers and sons, loss and recognition, and storytelling itself. It's a close encounter with a canonical work of Western literature – one of those books that everyone wants to have read but relatively few, in reality, do read – set largely in a classroom. Mendelsohn's An Odyssey fits neatly into the distinctive sub-genre of American non-fiction, the intellectual-pedagogical adventure. While this is manifestly Homer's song, Mendelsohn has transcribed it for contemporary voices: those of his students – one of whom, for a semester, is his 81-year-old "Daddy" – and a few travellers on a cruise around Odyssean sites in the Mediterranean. But Mendelsohn's odyssey ultimately succeeds in its aim: to bring the ancient epic home to us. The tone is gentle and erudite, now and then a little earnest, and every so often slightly naff: even if Jay, is actually called "Daddy" by his son, the repetition of this childlike honorific grates terribly. ![]()
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