To call An Odyssey a memoir, however, is to overlook its critical, perhaps even academic value. Mendelsohn, as expected, does not disappoint. Given our shared classical interests and my love of his reviews, I was beyond excited to enjoy An Odyssey, Mendelsohn’s memoir about Homer’s Odyssey, his relationship with his father, and the way in which the former radically transformed the latter at the end of his father’s life. His opinions are incisive and well-supported, and he is a fervent defender of the role of critics in our cultural lives. A trained classicist and professor at Bard, Mendelsohn is also a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, where he critiques translations of Greek and Roman classics, reviews books and films, and writes personal essays from time to time.

Mendelsohn closes his invocation by returning to the 'Odyssey' to enumerate its themes we can already see that the story he is about to tell shares those themes, but their dense, complicated interplay in fiction and fact will take the entire book to unpack.Full disclosure: Daniel Mendelsohn is one of my favorite authors and cultural critics. Mendelsohn, who 'felt that everything about me was hopelessly mushy and imprecise,' won Jay's grudging respect by mastering the rigorous grammars of Latin and ancient Greek, but the basic divide in their points of view remained. As for its characters, we learn that Jay, a retired research scientist, intimidated his son for years with his contempt for everything 'soft,' his insistence that truth was hard and exact. 'The scope of its action, the identities of its characters, the nature of its themes.' From his proem, we learn that the action includes father and son taking a post-seminar Mediterranean cruise, 'Retracing the Odyssey,' just a few months before Jay took a fall that led to a massive stroke.

He begins with 'Proem (Invocation)': 'The introductory lines that announce to the audience what the epic is about,' Mendelsohn explains.

An odyssey mendelsohn