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4.5
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
ByPublisher Description
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth--and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist. But through the sometimes uncomfortable months that the two men explore Homer's great work together--first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son's interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus's famous voyages--it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: Jay's responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesAn Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic Reviews
4.5
“Touching and captivating, An Odyssey manages to weave together a memoir of the author's father with a literary criticism of The Odyssey, connecting the two through the discussions the two of them had as the author's octogenarian father decided to audit his son's lectures in the Classics for one semester. Passages about the relationships and thoughts and feelings of Odysseus and Telemachus and Penelope manage to bubble up into the very real episodes of the author's life, and many of the main themes of the great Greek classic, namely those of adventure and patience, cunning vs. bravery, and the strength of relationships through great hardship, allow the author to shine a light on his own life and that of his father and learn quite a bit he didn't before.
Although many of the passages describing the finer easy-to-miss points and grand overarching themes in the Odyssey were enthralling, I found I was easily irked by the passages from the classroom where he hosts the seminar, with many of his students not really having a voice worth sharing -- this could just be teaching assistant-related trauma though so take this opinion with a grain of salt. Overall an excellent read and a novel way to write up a memoir.
(On a side note it seems all the father memoirs I've read recently have very taciturn and self-determined characters -- do these kinds of fathers tend to raise up self-reflective authors or do authors gravitate towards writing memoirs for the less exuberant members of their family?)”
“Daniel Mendelsohn and his father Jay learn about The Odyssey, Achilles, the ancient world, themselves, each other, life and death. Daniel Mendelsohn leads a readings considerably the Odyssey, a course that Jay also attends. This could go so wrong or so right or some of both. After they complete the course, the son and father duo go on a themed cruise to the lands of the Odyssey. While on the cruise, Daniel Mendelsohn comes to realize that the Odyssey speaks to a variety of people, each for their own reason. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1381.The_Odyssey could be read as a study of life, not just a life of the life of one family of Ithaca.”
“Part of my non-fiction, fathers month.
Definitely not a page-turner, took me about 20 plus days to finish the book. I read this book as a tribute to my cousin who died a COVID hero and a father to 3 children. I guess that connection made me love this book about fathers and sons. I loved how this was also a literary course at the same time. I haven't read "The Odyssey" but I am now intrigued by it. This was a great memoir for Jay Mendelsohn and I guess like Trisha,I'll read "The Odyssey" with him in mind.”
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