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The Lost Books of The Odyssey

by Zachary Mason (Goodreads Author)

3.92 of 5 stars 3.92 · rating details · 1,388 ratings · 353 reviews

A brilliant and beguiling reimagining of one of our greatest myths by a gifted young writer, 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 brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alterna

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Paperback, 256 pages

Published March 1st 2008 by Starcherone Books (first published 2007)

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Apr 10, 2012 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Steve by: Scott

This was a transformative book – for the author more so than for me. Mason was a computer scientist working in AI. He had no formal education in either fiction or the classics, but had an abiding interest in The Odyssey since his early teenage years. When he finally completed this book after plugging away on it for years, he got zero interest from publishers or agents. Then he won a young writers’ competition and suddenly became a star. I noticed in his bio that he’s now teaching at Oxford – the...more This was a transformative book – for the author more so than for me. Mason was a computer scientist working in AI. He had no formal education in either fiction or the classics, but had an abiding interest in The Odyssey since his early teenage years. When he finally completed this book after plugging away on it for years, he got zero interest from publishers or agents. Then he won a young writers’ competition and suddenly became a star. I noticed in his bio that he’s now teaching at Oxford – the one in England, no less.

My own transformation was more limited. It wasn’t that I disliked it; it’s more that I didn’t have much of a starting point to transform myself away from. I don’t think O Brother Where Art Thou counts as a very thorough grounding. But even without Homer as a springboard, I could tell that this was a very clever re-imagining of the classic travel adventure. It was confusing at first since the order was all scattered and the stories sometimes contradicted one another. (For instance, the various accounts of Penelope’s actions during his absence ran the gamut fidelity-wise.) But it was evidently very much in the spirit of the tales that had been told aloud for generations prior to Homer converting them to poetry and committing them to papyrus.

I liked Mason’s tone. His Odysseus was a man of many faces – often, but not always, brave, honorable, witty and wise. The mixture was inconsistent, but that was alright. This underscores how a legend like The Odyssey coalesced from many different sources. Variations would be expected as a consequence of repeated retelling and different takes on human/god behavior. Mason’s contributions reminded me of I’m Not There, the movie that was described as ruminations on Bob Dylan. The six character portrayals it featured were not meant to be of Dylan himself, but to embody different aspects of his music and life. Each of Mason’s 44 mini-chapters were inspired by the original, but were riffs he could call his own. Characters like Penelope, Telemachus, Achilles, Calypso, Agamemnon, Helen, the Cyclops and the sirens were also given their due. My favorite vignettes were the ones where Odysseus outwits some adversary. I also enjoyed it when some seemingly more modern insight into the way of folks was put to us in a distant historical context. A smart guy like Mason had plenty of those moments. For that matter, Homer probably did, too.

I imagine this is a great book for Homerphiles. It was even pretty good for a sham scholar like me. Plus, it’s a lot more accessible than anything Joyce wrote.(less)

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Jul 11, 2011 katie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read_11

I wanted to like this a lot, so was probably more disappointed than I should have been. there was a stretch in the middle where I was really into every story, but there were some in the earlier & later parts of the book that were so in love with their own cleverness that it just left a sour taste in my mouth for the whole thing. also, I thought the pseudo-academic footnotes were poorly used, weakly sprinkled throughout & with no clear purpose (specifically, I often couldn't decide if the...more

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Jul 23, 2012 Patrick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I’ve never read the Odyssey or the Iliad; my only knowledge of both comes third or fourth-hand (from cinema and literary references*) and so I was a little apprehensive about picking up this book. As the title suggests, it’s a collection of stories – mostly very short – which purport to be a number of missing fragments from the Odyssey. To me it sounded like what a keen Classics scholar might produce over a few quiet weekends, something which might require a similar kind of specialist knowledge...more I’ve never read the Odyssey or the Iliad; my only knowledge of both comes third or fourth-hand (from cinema and literary references*) and so I was a little apprehensive about picking up this book. As the title suggests, it’s a collection of stories – mostly very short – which purport to be a number of missing fragments from the Odyssey. To me it sounded like what a keen Classics scholar might produce over a few quiet weekends, something which might require a similar kind of specialist knowledge to access and enjoy. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.

What Mason has done with the story of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca is amazing, and one need only have a slight knowledge of the original to appreciate it. The word that best describes it is haunting; not only because the stories seem to possess a ghostly sensibility, but because for the author, the battle-weary Ulysses is a man pursued and pursuing things half-forgotten, misremembered. Adrift in time, the same story is told again and again except it is not the same: he meets Circe who is also Ariadne from the labyrinth of Minos; Helen of Troy and his wife Penelope switch places; he delivers ancient wisdom to Agamemnon, who rules over a ‘negative image of a palace’ sunken underground in a great white plain. Above all, the implication is that Ulysses himself was the hidden author of the Odyssey, and that so impossibly exaggerated and convoluted were the tales he told about himself and his companions that even Ulysses no longer understands where the truth begins. Some would argue** that this essential unreliability constitutes one definition of postmodernism.

I don’t know whether any or all of what Mason writes about is hinted at in Homer’s originals, and I don’t much care. Because the writing is beautiful. Careful, articulate, never gratuitous, the book possesses a deeply mysterious imagist quality that I found incredibly affecting. People have compared the stories to Borges and Calvino, and this is certainly valid, but Mason is more pared-down, more abstract than both. Borges would have made poems from many of these tales, but while Mason’s prose seems formless by comparison, one has the sense of invisible structures at work even while the text seems totally insubstantial; indeed, Mason has commented in interviews that he originally intended the book to be accompanied by an array of House of Leaves-esque paraphernalia: an appendix, faux-credentials, expanded footnotes, etc. While I’d be fascinated to see what happened to all that, I think he was probably right to cut it out.

One last thing: this isn’t totally relevant to the work, but I was impressed to find that this first novel came from someone who wasn’t previously an established author, or even a full-time writer. Mason now has a Wikipedia entry, but it lists his vocation as ‘computer scientist’ before his career as author. In a time when most advice for would-be writers tends to demand an obsessive degree of commitment, I find it rather wonderful to think that an amateur writer can still produce something so beautifully crafted, so near-perfect in conception and execution.

I literally cannot think of a bad thing to say about this book. Five stars.

* – Most of what I now know about the Odyssey comes from studying James Joyce’s rendition of that story at university. I really think Joyce would have totally understood and enjoyed this book.

** – Not me, particularly.(less)

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Jun 11, 2008 Vahid rated it 5 of 5 stars

A sort of fictional apocrypha to Homer's original Odyssey, the faux introduction claims that the Lost Books come from a document that has been transcribed and handed down over time and only recently deciphered into a number of smaller books exploring different themes and variations of this story.

What if Odysseus was a coward, whose actions ultimately resulted in the defeat of both sides, and he spent the next ten years disguised as a bard, telling the tale that became the Odyssey that we know to...more

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Dec 11, 2007 Eugene rated it 4 of 5 stars

underneath the cleverness and the copulating mirrors and the labyrinth architecture--of which there's admirably much--there's a melancholic source to all these odyssey-reflecting tales (victor of last year's penultimate starcherone fiction contest). all its revelations--the gods' winner's blues, the existential angst of the ancients, the mundane provenance of legends--are told with a wistful and appropriately epic heaviness.

how he wrings from the original more and more and more... and yet the w...more

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Mar 30, 2008 Steven rated it 4 of 5 stars

The phrase "underground classic" annoys the hell out of me, but this book might become one. Published by the small, Buffalo-based Starcherone Press (and winner of its most recent national fiction prize), ODYSSEY mixes a pseudo-academic framing story a la Borges with wonderfully imaginative views of Odysseus the character. I'll be writing a full review of this one soon for somebody (and will update this when I find out where), so I want to save my words. The only thing that keeps me from going ec...more

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Sep 01, 2008 Susan rated it 5 of 5 stars

This extraordinary book concerns some alternate versions of various incidents in the Odyssey. The book purports to be a recently decoded manuscript by various Homerids, members of a secret cult of bards standing in some sort of familial relationship to Homer. Beware, the author has a cat named Talleyrand. By turns humorous, brutal, cynical and melancholy, it is a book of exquisite untruths about the West's most famous liar. This is one of the most thrilling books I have read, I think because it...more

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Dec 07, 2011 Jeremy added it

Shelves: american-fiction

I fell for this hard. Mason doesn't rip off the Odyssey. He riffs off of it. He takes the images, the characters, the scenarios, and reassembles them into these poignant, beguiling little vignettes that feel reminiscent of Cortazar and Borges but still manage to be completely his own. There's tons of books out there which try to re-tell or rehash classical works. Most of them suck. This book actually enriched my understanding of Homer's Odyssey, it brought out all that was strange, mesmerizing a...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Kiera Healy rated it 3 of 5 stars

I have a degree in English literature and classical civilisation, and I've always loved the story of the Odyssey, so I was interested to read this modern take on it. Calling this a novel seems strange: it's really a collection of vignettes, each a different take on the Odyssey (and, to be fair, the Iliad: a number of the "books" take place during the Trojan campaign).

Due to the nature of the work, I found it a bit hit-and-miss. There are alternate versions, different endings, and non-canon point...more

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Aug 21, 2012 Ryandake rated it 5 of 5 stars

this is my second read of this book, and it's just as wonderful as the first.

it's not really written as a novel, though, despite the subtitle. it's written as a series of short stories, or meditations, or just beautifully-drawn word pictures. my impression of the book overall is that it's like a year of dreams, all based on the Iliad or the Odyssey; each night, something a little different, remembered in greater or lesser detail.

you get the story of the cyclops; how things might look if Penelope...more

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Aug 18, 2012 Ajk rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: funsies

Probably the most clever book I've read in an awfully long time. My only wish is that I didn't know it's factuality until after I read it.

The book is made up of several short stories, all of which are billed as bits and parts of the Odyssey that didn't make the codification. Or, as I put it to a friend; they're all the heretic bits. So you see multiple variations of Odysseus' return to Ithaca, multiple imaginations of Achilles, etc. There's also some neat stories: The Odyssey as a chess game, t...more

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Oct 24, 2011 Tom rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-novels, lit-riffs-on-lit

This book confirmed for me why it's probably a good thing that Borges never attempted, to my knowledge, to write a novel. What works so splendidly in individual short stories -- the cool tone, provocative ideas combined with fascinating detail -- would've become tiresome over the course of a novel. And that's exactly what happened as I progressed through Mason's book. I was quite delighted, even enchanted in the beginning, but then grew weary of the clever gamesmanship for its own sake. That I c...more This book confirmed for me why it's probably a good thing that Borges never attempted, to my knowledge, to write a novel. What works so splendidly in individual short stories -- the cool tone, provocative ideas combined with fascinating detail -- would've become tiresome over the course of a novel. And that's exactly what happened as I progressed through Mason's book. I was quite delighted, even enchanted in the beginning, but then grew weary of the clever gamesmanship for its own sake. That I could see (and I confess I didn't put much effort into sorting out connections) the chapters didn't seem to build on each other or even resonate in any particularly associative or collage-style fashion. Still, there were individual chapters-stories that I found very engrossing. The final chapter summed up for me the delights and frustrations of the entire book: it presents an intriguing idea that places Odysseus in contemporary light of "celebrity" but this idea seemed to come out of nowhere.

In his NYer review (see below) comparing 3 fictional takes on Greek myth -- by Mason, Malouf, and Banville -- Daniel Mendelsohn argues that the appeal of this genre is that, at its best, it provides new insights into ancient timeless stories that reinforce why such stories remain important and compelling to readers so many centuries later. Between Mason and Malouf, for "Ransom," a reimagining of Priam's visit to Achilles to plead for return of Hector's body, Mason does a much better job of adding something new to our understanding of Homer's genius (Banville was a distant third). Though I haven't yet read Ransom, I think M's criticism of Mason is a valid one.

Still, despite all the misgivings, I think any fan of Homer or Greek mythology, would consider Mason's book, if not a must-read, at least an intriguing riff on one of the great stories of all time. If nothing else, Mason's "lapidary" prose is worth the effort. (actually, I'm not even sure what that means -- slick, spare, but evocative, like stones worn smooth by water? -- but professional reviewers seem to use it all the time, so I thought I'd throw it in there. Anyway, M. writes fine, vivid sentences.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...(less)

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Aug 11, 2011 edward rathke rated it 4 of 5 stars

Everyone knows the stories, The Iliad and The Odyssey, the wrath of Achilles and the wandering of Odysseus. Here, Zachary Mason reinvents, inverts, reimagines, and takes apart the stories and characters we've known since before we could read. And, somehow, he manages to do it with great wit and elegance and ease. The first Lost Book, I think, sets the rest of the collection's direction.

--He had spent the days of his exile imagining different homecoming scenarios but it had never occurred to him...more

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Mar 13, 2011 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Inventive and finely realized, The Lost Books of the Odyssey is what the titles suggests, a collection of ostensibly lost stories of Odysseus’s delayed homecoming following the Greek war against Troy. Stories rooted in the oral tradition have many authors and variations so these largely short chapters have been re-imagined with implicitly different sources, common and unique themes, varying voices, familiar and novel episodes, and conflicting measures of the heroes, gods and goddesses, and villa...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Andrea De Pace rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Lost Books of the Odyssey fictionally claims to be based on some lately-discovered books of the Odyssey. On the basis of these books, different versions of the same myths are given, often overlapping different points of views: historical, philosophical and fictional.

The author's main achievement is to show to readers unfamiliar with Iliade and Odissea that the two poems were not conceived by a single author, who wrote them from the beginning to the end in a coherent and organised structured,...more The Lost Books of the Odyssey fictionally claims to be based on some lately-discovered books of the Odyssey. On the basis of these books, different versions of the same myths are given, often overlapping different points of views: historical, philosophical and fictional.

The author's main achievement is to show to readers unfamiliar with Iliade and Odissea that the two poems were not conceived by a single author, who wrote them from the beginning to the end in a coherent and organised structured, to witness a great war happened in XIII century b.C. Those mislead by movies such as Troy might find The Lost Books of the Odyssey enlightening and could find interesting to read works of the III century b.C (see Aristarco from Samotracia) which gave to Iliade and Odissea the final structure of poems, or studies of Giambattista Vico among those understanding the oral background on which Iliade and Odissea was being composed over centuries.

On the contrary, there are other aspects which are not correct and might create further confusion in novices of ancient Greek literature. Iliade and Odissea hide so many levels of understanding (historical, sociological, racial, theological, ethical...), that it becomes totally unnecessary to add original interpretations which are not based on any sound study.

E.g. Odisseo as incarnation of Death is funny but would the novice recognise instead how revolutionary was Odisseo's hybris and his Illuminism? Would he see how Odisseo was much alive until Romanticism and later on? The author forgets that all the different parts of Iliade and Odissea stitched together by oral tradition over centuries had in common one thing which lacks in his fantasies. Iliade and Odissea are not historical books, nor fictional, not even mythological. Iliade and Odissea are pure poetry and they are the poetical expression of the spirit of ancient Greek (see Giambattista Vico).

Does it make sense to play a "what if" game with poetry? Hopefully only readers well-acquainted with classical studies will read this appealing book.(less)

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Jun 10, 2010 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

The Lost Books of The Odyssey: A Novel is a remarkable find for any self-respecting bibliophile. The book is a splendid collection of possible outcomes of the epic Odyssey. What if Athena proposed to Odysseus, or if Odysseus helped wage war on the land of the dead? What would have happened if he made the choice not to leave Circe, or if he was never a hero? What if he was a simple "coward", who despised the ways of war and established a name for himself through bardship? These are all possibilit...more

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May 25, 2010 Mr. Davies rated it 5 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Seven weeks late I sit to gather my thoughts about this book.

I thought The Lost Books of the Odyssey was tremendous. I readily admit to a strong infatuation with Greco-Roman mythology, and any book about the Odyssey (including the book I read after this, No Man’s Lands: One Man’s Journey through the Odyssey) satisfies me immensely. I found this book playful and provocative, irreverent yet simultaneously elegiac. I read several published reviews that chastised the book’s misses, and I agree that...more Seven weeks late I sit to gather my thoughts about this book.

I thought The Lost Books of the Odyssey was tremendous. I readily admit to a strong infatuation with Greco-Roman mythology, and any book about the Odyssey (including the book I read after this, No Man’s Lands: One Man’s Journey through the Odyssey) satisfies me immensely. I found this book playful and provocative, irreverent yet simultaneously elegiac. I read several published reviews that chastised the book’s misses, and I agree that some of the stories missed the mark. However, my memory swims in the brilliance of the successful stories in Mason’s collection. I will include excerpts from this book, with appropriate caveats, when I next teach The Odyssey proper, or if I ever teach a creative writing course.

Random Thoughts and Notes, including potential spoilers

• I don’t even need to reopen the book to recall the story about Achilles drinking himself silly and trying to injure himself. Of course he would do that to impress and intimidate people, and of course that would be a cause of his depression. This idea reminds me of something that Palahniuk would write.
• Most irreverent of all are the twists on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. His homecoming is the crux of the story, and so Mason’s manipulations seem all the more impertinent. But why wouldn’t Penelope give up and remarry? Why mightn’t Odysseus return only to freak out? Or simply opt not to return at all? (By the way, Odysseus slipping away from the war only to become the bard who builds his own legacy is amazingly inspired.)
• I also like the new roles for Athena. She is my cat when: “She was like a cat who likes company but will not suffer herself to be touched. I never said anything but her presence was a comfort to me” (67). Or the idea that she herself yearns to be more than a divine guide, an immortal elder sister, to Odysseus, and instead wants to be his lover.
• Even in the clumsy Chapter 42, in which the Iliad becomes a manual for chess, the inherent imagination of the author overcomes any pitfalls in the writing.
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Apr 11, 2010 R. Burns rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'm about halfway through the book, having picked it while browsing in a bookstore. My first thoughts, judging from the cover that it would be a stuffy tribute, the sort quasi-religious things academics often do because they can't create original work themselves, only derivative works. After reading the first short story, however, I was hooked. Yes, there was the tribute to the hero who has been described as having "cunning intelligence," but it was more than that; original and scholarly faithfu...more

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Mar 24, 2010 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: recent-enthusiasms, minimalism

A blending of the Borges literary legacy with Zoran Zivkovic’s mode of “mosaic novel” writing, The Lost Books of the Odyssey refracts the story of The Odyssey and the person of Odysseus down a long corridor of funhouse mirrors--44 chapters of jazzy improvisation. And, at least on a first reading, Zachary Mason seems never to hit the wrong note, at once evoking with considerable skill the Time of Myth and a limbo-like atmosphere where post-modern narrative play is the most natural thing in the wo...more

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Mar 01, 2010 Valerie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Review published in the Santa Cruz Weekly... 2/17/10

We’ve all read Homer’s Odyssey, or at least as a culture we’ve been hearing about it for the last several thousand years. Odysseus, the clever, long-suffering hero of the Trojan War, takes ten years to get home to his faithful wife Penelope, having a seemingly endless series of life-threatening and erotic adventures along the way. It’s an epic feast of Freudian symbolism, a middle-aged fantasy of resilient ingenuity and potency, a tale of ident...more Review published in the Santa Cruz Weekly... 2/17/10

We’ve all read Homer’s Odyssey, or at least as a culture we’ve been hearing about it for the last several thousand years. Odysseus, the clever, long-suffering hero of the Trojan War, takes ten years to get home to his faithful wife Penelope, having a seemingly endless series of life-threatening and erotic adventures along the way. It’s an epic feast of Freudian symbolism, a middle-aged fantasy of resilient ingenuity and potency, a tale of identity lost and regained.

Now The Odyssey has come to us in another form, disguised as cleverly and strategically as Odysseus himself when cloaked by the goddess Athena’s concealing mists. Only neither Odysseus nor Athena were writers or poets, and Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, is both.

The Lost Books takes the form of a series of carefully crafted vignettes – dreamy, ruminative, surreal at times – that re-work the well-worn paths of The Odyssey with a deftly innovative lyrical style, and a compelling philosophical, even metaphysical slant.

Framed by the pretense of “translating” recently discovered fragments of “pre-Ptolemaic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus” that contain “forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’s story,” Mason’s narrative is at times playful in its revisions and darkly chilling in others.

In one episode, after defeating the Trojans and wandering the seas for years in an effort to get home, Odysseus is shipwrecked, almost drowned, but finds himself in a time slip, being rescued by Agamemnon, on his way to Troy to fight the war that has not yet begun. Locked below deck on Agamemnon’s ship, but also imprisoned in the labyrinth of time, Odysseus discovers a book called The Iliad, and begins to read the story of the famous war, featuring himself, but notices that the author gets many of the details wrong.

Time and its variable, ironic nature is a central theme in Mason’s work; almost every one of the vignettes bends or refracts time in order to imagine alternative destinies for the mythical heroes whose archetypal quests form the foundation of Western culture.

Besides Odysseus, Mason reworks scenes from legends about Theseus, Agamemnon, Achilles, and Alexander the Great – all of which shatter any previous fixed notions we might have had about these figures.

However, some of the most interesting terrain subjected to Mason’s radical revisions are the women of The Odyssey. Odysseus’s wife Penelope takes many different forms in a number of vignettes – most memorably a shape-shifting wild woodland creature; Odysseus’ witchy lover Circe turns out to be the leader of the Bacchae; he is propositioned by the goddess Athena; and – unbeknownst to him – hapless Ariadne (after being abandoned by Theseus) takes on a new identity as the seductress Calypso.

Before he lands on Calypso’s island and becomes her lover, Mason has Odysseus overhear the three blind Fates discussing his destiny: should they make Calypso a “horror” to punish him? Hiding outside their grisly cave, Odysseus perfectly imitates one of their voices and interjects, “No, let her be beautiful and kind as summer.” Thinking that one of the other hags has made this suggestion, the Fates assent, but comment, “do not forget…he is, for all that he is bound to us, allowed just once to direct his fate…Let us hope he does not meddle enough to get himself home.” Odysseus has just wasted his one chance to change his destiny, but at least Calypso will be a beauty.

Reading Mason’s book is a journey through the imagination via lush, eloquent prose that will re-ignite a love of mythology within its readers, or – if it wasn’t there before – will inspire entirely fresh insights into the ways that myths shape and inform the way we tell the stories of our lives.
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Aug 24, 2010 Lauren rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. I think I like modern retellings of ancient stories in general -- Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent" and Robert Graves' "I, Claudius" & "Claudius the God," for example.

The premise of this book is this: before Homer wrote "The Odyssey," there existed many versions of the story of Odysseus and his wanderings after the Trojan War. Homer just chose one of them. According to the author, this book is a sort of "theme and variations" (I prefer "fugue") on the Odyssey. The fo...more

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Apr 02, 2010 Rebecca rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I wish there were a way of giving this books 3.5 stars-- 4 seems just a bit too high, but I liked it more than a measly 3. Since I'm feeling expansive, and since it's pretty impressive for a first novel, I'll round up. I started this immediately upon finishing the Odyssey (literally: I finished listening to Derek Jacobi reading Homer, then clicked over to this one waiting on my iPod), and it was the perfect coda to my self-imposed little project of catching up on the epics. One of the most pleas...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Alexandra rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2012

A number of reviews over on goodreads seem to have two things in common: the reviewer hasn't read the source material, and they didn't particularly enjoy this collection. I applaud someone for stepping out of their comfort zone, but I really don't understand bagging something when the fundamental context isn't understood. Because this really, really doesn't stand stand with knowledge of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and it doesn't pretend it even wants to.

I adored this collection, and I am fantasti...more A number of reviews over on goodreads seem to have two things in common: the reviewer hasn't read the source material, and they didn't particularly enjoy this collection. I applaud someone for stepping out of their comfort zone, but I really don't understand bagging something when the fundamental context isn't understood. Because this really, really doesn't stand stand with knowledge of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and it doesn't pretend it even wants to.

I adored this collection, and I am fantastically thankful that I happened to pick it up a few years ago at the closing-down sale of my favourite bookshop (which has since reopened!). I'm not an author, but I would suggest that anyone who wants to write short fiction - and who has the background - should read this, because it does the short form in glorious, scintillating ways.

The Preface claims that this set of 44 stories translated from variations to the standard Homeric tale found in Oxyrhynchus. I'll admit that for the first couple of stories I actually half-wondered whether this might possibly be true - I'd never heard of such a find, but Oxyrhynchus has been an incredible literary treasure trove; it's not like I work consistently in the field so it's feasible I might have missed hearing about it. I fairly quickly decided that this wasn't the case, but it doesn't matter in the slightest. I feel that Mason has stayed true to the core of the mythology, and what more could you want?

Some of the stories presented here are vignettes, others are more substantial stories. Most of them take aspects of The Odyssey and... shift them. Sometimes subtly, sometimes extravagantly, but almost always with that kernel that means it feels basically plausible to an archaic Greek mythological milieu. There are a few that stray beyond those bounds, but even those are wonderfully well written, so I don't mind. They too help to build up sense of shifting possibilities, what-ifs and could-have-beens. There are a few stories that take aspects from other parts of Greek mythology and tie them, in convoluted but logical ways, to the Troy story; and just one or two that could feasibly be set outside of the 13th century BC, but not with any firm proof that they do so.

A review of all 44 stories would be tiresome and, in some cases, impossible without ruining the sheer pleasure of the reading act. Suffice it to say that Penelope gets some attention, Athene a bit more, and Calypso and Circe a lesser bit. Most of them involve travelling, which is naturally appropriate; some are in Troy and some on Ithaka. Sometimes Odysseus is triumphant, other times a coward, and occasionally seen through others' eyes - like Polyphemus (sorry, bad joke). Once, Paris is Death. Occasionally, the reality of a two-decade absence is hinted at. Tragically, Hektor does not feature in any meaningful way.

This collection is wonderful and glorious and I loved it very much.(less)

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Jun 22, 2011 Jeff rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mason has written an intriguing series of vignettes that serve as fun alternative perspectives on The Odyssey. It is labeled "A Novel," but it is only a novel in so much as each of the stories have a central connection through [Book: The Odyssey]. It is actually more of a series of short stories that re-envision different elements of both the The Odyssey and The Iliad.

My favorite element in the book is the way that Mason plays with the nature and role of storytelling. For example in one story t...more

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May 22, 2011 David Claudon rated it 5 of 5 stars

In The Lost Books of The Odyssey: A Novel, Zachary Mason tells and sometimes retells new versions of the familiar and unfamiliar from The Odyssey and The Iliad. As someone who enjoys Homer immensely, I loved this book.

Here, unfettered by Homer's version, Penelope marries Menelaus, Telemachus has a sister, Odysseus marries Nausicca and makes no attempt to return home until Athena appears to tell him it is time. Odysseus is more than once seen as a bard, willing to embellish any truth until the st...more

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Sep 25, 2010 Andy Matuschak rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mr. Mason has clearly spent many long nights thinking about the nature of self, glory, and free will. He's taken those insights and framed them within the contexts of the old stories told and retold throughout the centuries. The conceit: time has already distorted these stories; how else could they have been warped?

The two-to-five page "books" contained within are concise but visceral. Odysseus makes an incredible foil for the author's points as the manifest superlative of power and tragedy. Fam...more

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Sep 21, 2010 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars

From the interviews I've read and heard with Zachary Mason, he's irresistible. A child Computer Science prodigy who bounced around Silicon Valley start ups with a lyrical, experimental novel brewing all the while? Sign me up. I love those polymathic types.

The book doesn't disappoint, as long as you go in with an open mind. It's a long series of imaginative snapshots of the Odyssey, most from wildly unorthodox perspectives. What makes Odysseus so different from his other heroic peers is that he g...more

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Dec 22, 2012 Emmy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ever since I was a child, the adventures of Odysseus have been some of my favorite stories. To me, Odysseus has been the perfect hero--brave, not always strong, but clever to a fault. And up to this point, that's all he was. But, after reading The Lost Books of the Odyssey, I discovered something else which could be added to that list: Odysseus is also profoundly human. And story after story confirms this, all while keeping his heroic status.

This is not a book you can read expecting one, long, c...more

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Jan 30, 2012 Terence rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-books

Even for a reader with only a passing knowledge of Homer's epics -- and perhaps even for those with no such knowledge -- Mason's book holds many delights, with its fantastical stories, clever plot twists, and expressive language. For readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey, though, the pleasures multiply exponentially. Mason's premise is that here are 44 tales culled from the cycle of disparate stories that Homer organized and refined into his tales. What he presents are some intriguing alternate t...more

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Feb 04, 2011 Akiko rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Fans of The Iliad and The Odyssey; anyone who enjoys creative, original literature

Shelves: read-audio-book-2011

I was pleasantly surprised by the originality and creativity of this book. It's a series of vignettes that tell bits and pieces of The Iliad and The Odyssey from different perspectives or with alternate endings. Some stick to Homer's original plotline but give additional insight into what the character (often Odysseus, but sometimes another personage that figures in the tales) might have been thinking or feeling. Others diverge from the source material and delve into the realm of "what if?"

A qui...more

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About Zachary Mason

Im currently the Shade Professor at Magdalen College, Oxford. I have ceased to sound very American, and I certainly don't sound English - it seems that I am now from nowhere in particular. Luckily, I live half the year on a small island in the Greek archipelago, where no one speaks English well enough to detect my phonetic anomaly.

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“A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life -- kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction.” — 2 people liked it

“It seemed odd no one had thought of it before but in general there is no accounting for the bovine stupidity of mankind.” — 2 people liked it

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