Word: tale
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Mason’s task is a bold one. After all, few read Homer’s “Odyssey” with the nagging feeling that something is missing from the story, and the epic is a touchstone for tales of travel and homecoming. As early as the first century BCE, Vergil was borrowing from the Greek epic to tell his own “Aeneid”; Leopold Bloom’s very different wandering in “Ulysses” set the bar almost impossibly high for modern adaptations. Mason’s book, then...
...living in a sanatorium, where he spends his days trying to remember a distant war. Another has him as Agamemnon’s prized assassin, faced with the unfortunate order of killing himself. Sticking with the pretext of fragmentation, Mason never fully fleshes out the action in each tale. As a result, his stories elude simple interpretation...
...times, Mason takes up the epic’s loose ends, giving voice to Homer’s minor characters. The Cyclops, who in Homer’s tale finds himself blinded and beguiled by Odysseus’s wit, tells his own account of the hero’s visit here. As he traces his loss of sight, the Cyclops sheds light on the duplicity of appearance. He says of his offender, “He had not uttered a single true word, of course, but we are all revealed in our lies...
...mostly the book circles around the craft of truth itself. Mason is a computer scientist by training, and codes and mazes pattern his stories. In one tale, Theseus, famed conqueror of the Minotaur, slays the beast only to wander forever in a labyrinth. In another, sirens seduce Odysseus not through their beautiful tunes, but through the promise of wisdom. “As their songs crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that... behind everything... was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack,” the wily...
...fuzziness of Gosling's tale, along with his repeated insistence that his victim was not his official partner but - using another phrase that might be heard in Nottingham and other parts of England - his "bit on the side," makes him a less than ideal celebrity figurehead for the right-to-die movement. In fact, Gosling seemed determined to avoid such a role, telling interviewers he wasn't calling for a change in the law. "He's an independent man. He's quite idiosyncratic; some might say eccentric. I don't think he wants to ally himself with any cause," says...