Word: odyssey
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...Lost Books of the Odyssey,” Zachary Mason’s mesmerizing new novel, takes Odysseus’s homeward bound journey and riddles it with uncertainty. Ithaca could be the hero’s home or it could be an illusion. Odysseus himself may be the author of his own story; his heroic deeds could be merely his own invention. There’s no one end, no one story. Mason’s tale doesn’t just wander—it writhes...
Mason’s stories are brief and flavorful. In a short introduction to the book, he presents his vignettes as recently discovered fragments containing alternative versions of “The Odyssey.” One story has Odysseus (here named “Mr. O.”) 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...
...indeed, both models were strong performers in January, in what was otherwise a subpar month. So the automaker not only gets an opportunity to reap a windfall in sales; it also can liquidate excess inventory without adjusting production levels or resorting to incentives. Supplies of its Pilot SUV and Odyssey minivan are about normal, and only its popular CRV crossover is in short supply...
...couple were devoted to scholarship, not politics. In the early 1950s, Yang declined a prestigious offer to translate Chairman Mao's works into English, "much preferring to translate classical Chinese literature instead," he wrote in his 2002 autobiography, White Tiger. Yang translated works including The Odyssey and Pygmalion into Chinese, and he and his wife collaborated on rendering selections from Sima Qian's Records of the Historian and stories by the 20th century writer Lu Xun into English...
...while “Austerlitz” shares these works’ fixation on uncovering the histories of forgotten people and places, its odyssey is a darker, more troubling one, and its construction more deliberate. The novel is preoccupied with the line that separates being from non-being, a line that blurs and trembles when we realize the contingency of our present existence on the now-invisible events of the past. For this reason, it is tempting to read “Austerlitz” as Sebald’s swan song, haunted, as it is, by one man?...