Daniel Mendelsohn

Meta-genre. Part history, part personal memoir, part literary criticism. The author is interested in a literary device, the so-called ring construction, which he describes as a digression within a text that might stand alone, and might connect, recursively, to other parts of the text or other texts altogether. He describes his own difficult time writing the history of his family in the Holocaust, followed by his experience reading the Odyssey with his father and their cruise to several Odyssey-sites. He refers back to these experiences recursively as he digresses to tell of Erich Auerbach, a German who fled the Holocaust to Turkey to try to write a comprehensive treatise on Western literature, contrasted with Francois Fenelon, a 17th century cleric who wrote a recursive digression that explained the absence of Odysseus' son in the middle part of the Odyssey. Finally there is a discussion of the recursions and rings in the work of another exile, WG Sebold.
All this material is intertwined in Mendelsohn's life---amusing overlaps and surprising bits of intellectual heritage. More interesting is the contrast between Greek and Hebraic storytelling. The former, in its use of the rings, tells an optimistic tale of connections (rings) that satisfy. The latter may see more intricacies, may include more detail, but may be darker insofar as the mysteries and miseries of lives are not resolvable. For Mendelsohn, I think he has found relief in his classical views, the relief that comes from finding, despite having been immersed in the unthinkable horror of the Holocaust, a sense of coherence.… (mehr)

While Mendelsohn is obviously a fine writer and knowledgeable on Homer, I found the premise of this story a little too forced and too personal for my liking.

In this story Mendelsohn relates the year his retired father joined his seminar on Homer’s Odyssey, the journey in the father-son classic paralleling a journey this father and son have toward their own reconciliation.

Mendelsohn then takes his father on a cruise in the Mediterranean themed on the Odyssey.

He skips back and forth — quite skillfully in my opinion — between the seminar, his own real family events, the cruise, and some sleuthing the author does to fill in questions left unanswered about his father.

But he never really makes me feel “one of the family.”
He’s just a little too cold and calculating.

One of the sub-themes not fully explored in the book is how Mendelsohn himself traverses homosexuality to eventually become a father himself of two boys. But by the time I’ve learned more than I wanted to know about his father, I’m afraid I don’t want to know any more.

I can empathize with the desire, however, to better understand one’s father. In some unsavoury ways we try to compete with the past. And it can lead to some unhappy endings.

… (mehr)