Michal Ajvaz - Evil gangrene that will gradually overwhelm everything. The letters exhale a poison that discreetly corrodes the familiar world

Michal Ajvaz, The Other City (Dalkey Archive Press, 2009)

«In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so familiar to tourists. The Other City is a guidebook to this invisible,"other Prague," overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads. Heir to the tradition and obsessions of Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the long and distinguished line of Czech fantasists, Ajvaz's Other City is the emblem of all the worlds we are blind to, being caught in our own ways of seeing.»

«In Ajvaz's first novel to be translated into English, a Borgesian cohort of freakish creatures, talking birds and eccentric city dwellers lurk on the margins of an alternative Prague. An unnamed protagonist learns that a book written in an unearthly language is an opening to a dangerous world that is just around the corner from normal life. More and more frequently, the protagonist stumbles across scenes from the other city-he spies on an inscrutable religious service, is treated to "a lecture on the subject of Latest Discoveries about the Great Battle in the Bedrooms." The city's inhabitants do not take kindly to his intrusions; he is pursued by weasels, shot at by a helicopter and nearly eaten by a half-man, half-shark. Meanwhile, overheard conversations dissolve into nonsense, elk are stabled inside statues and birds recite passages from an epic poem. Ajvaz's novel is a gorgeous matryoshka doll of unreason, enigma and nonsense-truly weird and compelling.» - Publishers Weekly


«The texts of the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz (pronounced EYE-voss) are evidence not only of a clever imagination, but also of a mind that savors the difficulty of reading—a mind for which language is not merely a vehicle for the delivery of information, but an integral part of the very world it is trying to communicate. Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you.
The novel is reminiscent of Surrealism in the way it departs from common experience and 'common sense,' attacks logical rules and customs, and takes things out of their familiar contexts. It is, however, a work more of invention and intellectual game than of spontaneous imagination. The ornamental imagery becomes fixed in obsessive formulae and configurations, and this is somewhat disproportionate to how it eludes definite, accepted meanings, and moves to other possibilities and worlds, which are protean and ever emerging, and to how it calls upon us to accept another cosmos. The setting is a textual maze from which there is no escape and whose ultimate meaning remains forever inaccessible, since the ultimate contexts are never emphasized.» - Jonathan Bolton

«If you love a story that begins with finding a mysterious book in a musty antiquarian bookshop, a book filled with fanciful indecipherable script, a book with disturbing illustrations depicting a strange and terrible world, a world of golden temples and murderous tigers, and if a story with a book hinting that a parallel world exists within everyday life’s interstices, or, rather, within the very walls, alleys, and even furniture (including wardrobes) of the so-called real one, “a world in such close proximity to our own, one that seethes with such strange life, one that was possibly here before our own city and yet we know absolutely nothing about it,” where televisions talk to each other and sounds waft out of postcards, a frightening world of flying and talking fish, shark-headed attackers, crazed weasels, a world of cryptic speech and arcane rituals, a story where the “real” world’s libraries turn into jungles, where pianos turn into crabs, where a small cylinder in a park is really a cupola’s skylight turret, a story as much concerned with unraveling the mysteries of language as it is in weaving a spiraling intrigue of its own through unapologetically overwrought, longwinded, and interminable prose, a prose weighted by perspicacious and a kind of claustrophobic attention to detail, a prose that like the phosphorescent statues it describes is “in the style of a kind of gloomy subterranean Baroque,” a prose reminiscent of Conrad’s voluble interior chatter and Borges’s pseudo-scientific and philosophical ramblings, a prose issued by a peripatetic and persnickety narrator whose own gifted and jeweled loquacity apparently never slows him down, or annoys any of the other characters, for that matter, since they too offer labyrinthine monologues filled with fascinating asides, essayistic descriptions, and absurd connections and explanations, and where they talk of “banned verbal tenses,” and “the white monster tense and the jungle tense,” and of how “all verbal endings are totally harmless and have nothing to do with the evil music that destroys shiny machines,” and of how “[c]ase endings will eventually free themselves from their demeaning position and shine once more in their ancient glory,” and how “[b]it by bit they will separate themselves from the roots of nouns and become what they were at the beginning—the invocation of demons,” and if a story like this also turns out to be a love story, a love story between the hero and an irksome, at best, and sometimes deadly romantic foil, a love story that never really consummates, whose rare intimacy is a silent cuddling together “of two bodies with which something reaches out to the darkness and frost, as atrocious as any of the monsters creeping about the plains of the stars,” and if this love story is really a smaller one beneath a larger love story, like an umbrella under a canopy, that is, a story that is really a love letter to language, if a story like this interests you, then Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City, the first of the Czech writer’s novels to be translated into English, would be a great one to pick up, for while the romantic undercurrent between the narrator and his muse pulsating throughout the story is an intriguing one, it is his love of books and language that drives his obsessions like wandering Prague’s narrow gothic and baroque streets, its sprawling Old Town Square, and sundry ledges, alleys, and shadowed corridors, a love of language signaled when he (paraphrasing Ajvaz) returns to his book, savors its aroma and allows his eyes to “flit over its pages, reading here and there the fragment of a sentence that suddenly sparkled mysteriously because it was taken out of context,” an obsession that—after learning that the “library is a treacherous place”—leads him to conclude that “books treat solely of other books and that signs likewise refer to other signs; that a book has nothing to do with reality, but instead reality itself is a book since it is created by language…that books and signs remain rooted in reality and governed by its unknown currents, that our signifying and communicating is embedded in being, which signifies itself, its secret rhythms, and that original signification, that original dull glow of being keeps alive our meanings while at the same time threatening to swallow them again and dissolve them in itself,” all of which leads this reader to believe that Michal Ajvaz may have written The Other City so that its reader is inspired to follow the narrator’s lead and allow his or her eyes to randomly flit over its pages, and find countless examples of mysteriously sparkling sentence fragments, sentences where plot is a kind of secondary scaffolding from which to drape them, sentences that would as much open up the doors of perception as transfix the meandering waves of attention, sentences that like the alphabet from that magical book this whole story begins with seem “to be bursting under the pressure of some expanding internal force,” sentences full of yearning, of disquieting awe, sentences that seek a lost beginning, sentences positing “that the dread you feel on the periphery of your world is the beginning of the bliss of return, that death in the jungles of the margins is a shining rebirth.”» - John Madera


«The Other City is a novel of another Prague, a second city layered largely invisibly behind the first, familiar one. Steeped in the fiction of Prague-based authors who dabbled in the mystical and fantastical, ranging from Kafka through Leo Perutz and Gustav Meyrink to Karel Čapek, and with a healthy dose of Borges thrown in for good measure, Ajvaz offers a semi-alternate-universe novel whose greatest appeal is the overlap of this secondary world with the first.
It begins, as these things often do, with a book, written in a mysterious indecipherable script, and with a strange greenish glow to it. Trying to learn more about the script, the narrator discovers others have come across similar books -- and that they hold other-worldly powers, the world around the readers undergoing bizarre changes ("The piano turned into crabs and crept around the bedroom", etc.) as they open a portal to a different (sur-)reality found beside our own. As one person warns:
Just look at the artful and crafty expression in those letters ! It's an evil gangrene that will gradually overwhelm everything. The letters exhale a poison that discreetly and assiduously corrodes the familiar things of our world.
But the narrator's curiosity has been piqued, and he can't leave be, and he goes off in search of this other-world, encountering glimpses and portals to it all over Prague. It's a world of strange rituals and flying ray-fish (the narrator hitches a ride at one point). The pages of a book he leafs through turn to wooden boards and then the paddles of a mill wheel. Yet the differences extend beyond physical transformations, down to completely different foundations of everything fundamental, as this world is built up entirely differently than ours. Among the school-lessons he overhears:
Case endings will eventually free themselves from their demeaning position and shine once more in their ancient glory. Bit by bit they will separate themselves from the roots of nouns and become what they were at the beginning - the invocation of demons.
As he first begins to realize what's out there the narrator wonders:
Can there really exist a world in such close proximity to our own, one that seethes with such strange life, one that was possibly here before our own city, and yet we know absolutely nothing about it ? The more I pondered on it, the more I was inclined to think that it was indeed quite possible, that it corresponded to our lifestyle, to the way we lived in circumscribed spaces that we are afraid to leave.
Indeed, he sees traces of the other-world everywhere - and, once he really starts looking, plunges in repeatedly. Among the best descriptions are those of the souls who have been lost here - the girl who got on the wrong tramway, the library, in whose depths several librarians disappear every year ("and the librarianship schools are unable to turn out enough graduates").
Eventually, he realizes:
Now I knew that the other city can only be entered by someone who leaves in the awareness that the journey he is undertaking has no purpose, because purpose means a place in the fabric of relations that create the home, and that it is not even purposeless, because purposelessness simply complements purpose and belongs to this world.
Ajvaz is successful in conjuring up a quite wonderful beyond-purposeless-world - but that's also one of the difficulties with the book, as it is almost all atmosphere but all to... little purpose. This is a novel of discovery of and of getting to know this secondary world, but Ajvaz is so enamored of his invention that it doesn't go much beyond that.
One character warned early on:
Don't concern yourself with weird books that remind you of the frontiers of our world. They can't lead you out of it, they can only eat away at its structure from within.
But Ajvaz doesn't eat away at enough in his own book, too satisfied with the neat concept and a few wild ideas. Yes, this is wonderful fantasy - scenes that unfold like in surreal films, or Daliesque artworks. And, yes, there is some narrative tension, as the narrator has repeated narrow escapes from this other-world - but on the whole there is too little story here, and the other-world alone is not compelling enough to sustain a whole novel (although perhaps it might be for some readers). Intriguing, but not entirely satisfying.» - M. A. Orthofer


«The Other City by Czech writer Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues. As the jacket copy reads, the novel serves as a kind of "guidebook to this invisible 'other Prague,' overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads." Clearly, the publisher, Dalkey Archive Press, is trying to evoke echoes of Italo Calvino and Jorges Luis Borges. However, The Other City tells a more conventional story than Borges and it is too much Ajvaz's own creation and style to be called "Calvino-esque" - especially since Ajvaz's prose in translation is meatier, less dry in its humor, more generous in its descriptions. A book, naturally, triggers the adventure embarked upon by our nameless narrator, a book that shows that "The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn't run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it."
There's a definite whimsical streak in The Other City, and at first I thought it might overwhelm the stolid foundation of reality needed to make most fantasies work. However, the whimsy becomes encrusted with the absurd and the grotesque until it begins to make the reality look almost ephemeral by comparison. Strange scenes involving bizarre fish and other monstrosities evoke the great Czech filmmaker Svankmajer, with a hint of Dali in their nimbleness.
Then there are overheard conversations, as when the narrator eavesdrops on a surreal discussion between a teacher and a girl, with the teacher bombastically making various claims only for the girl to give this remarkable speach: "The girl moved closer to the teacher. 'Don't fool yourself,' she said harshly. 'The artillery will never return. They will study in a decaying, incredible Oxford of garbage tips. The candied books will be confiscated and, for the glory of shiny and cruel machines, they will be tossed into saurians from the reviewing stand. (Saurians in those days will still parade obediently four abreast, but soon afterwards they will conspire with us little girls and declare aloud what has been hushed up for centuries, namely, that dogs have no objective existence).'" When the teacher protests that he has solved this problem by purging "geometry of polar animals. Are you saying that was all in vain?" the girl replies, "Of course it was all in vain... You purged geometry of polar animals...You've forgotten the first axiom of Euclid states that there will always be one or two penguins in geometrical space?"
And so it goes. There's a tension in The Other City between the fanciful and the baroque, the cleverly odd and the deeply odd, that makes the novel work. It's the kind of book you let wash over you in waves--episodic, funny but not too silly, and marked by a first-class imagination. It deserves a longer review than I've given it here, but full marks to Dalkey Archive Press for introducing readers in English to the talented Michal Ajvaz.» - Jeff VanderMeer

«Most men don’t see because they're all too accustomed to seeing. - Marcel Bealu, The Experience of the Night
"Every genuine encounter is an encounter with a monster."-Michal Ajvaz
The Other City is a mesmerizing novel, written, like the purple-spined book at its heart, in a viral language capable of infecting even the most sober reader. It is a picture book without pictures, a rational hallucination, parts fairytale and allegory on reading, and an imaginative treatise on seeing. It is a bulging suitcase of a book, crammed with the laundry of several traditions; yet it wears this threadbare suit so that it looks new. (The tears have been sewn and a little water rubbed on its worn patches makes it shine.) It shares an affinity with Borges' dizzying metaphysical speculations, Calvino's apparent lightness of approach (draped over elaborate structures), the dream logic of the Surrealists - particularly that of their precursor Marcel Bealu in his Experience of the Night, and a more than titular similarity with Alfred Kubin's The Other Side.
To call The Other City strange is warranted, but the imprecision of the adjective leaves something to be desired. Perhaps more suitable would be to call the novel estranging in its ability to, among other things, (re)turn the reader's gaze to the liminal spaces of our too-narrow world. Ajvaz's wandering narrator crawls into shadowy corners, dusty undersides, unkempt closets, and continual threat in a quest for an alien center that perpetually recedes from his view, certain that "The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of the nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it."
To continue to conjecture over Ajvaz's aim is to turn into a chore the recollection of this visually stunning, labyrinthine novel. A partial inventory of its images reveals its richness: a tsunami wave waiting just outside a window; glass statues in which fluorescent fish battle; the pages of a book turning to lead as a reader turns them; a cruise ship silently plowing through the snowy streets of Prague; a comforter stretching into a convoluted plain (of course!); and the truly astonishing metamorphosis of a library into a jungle….
A quotation suffices where I fail:
"I entered one of the narrow aisles. For a while I proceeded in darkness, which was illuminated here and there by the glow of putrefying books. I switched on my torch and let the beam wander over the bookshelves. In the damp air the pages of books curled, swelled, frayed and turned to pulp, expanding and forcing the bindings outwards, tearing them and squeezing out through the holes…. What was most nauseating in these stuffy and fetid surroundings was not the realization that a strange accidental calamity was occurring with the rampant nature devouring the fruits of the human spirit; what gave rise to increasing anxiety was rather the fact that the dreamlike transformation of books into dangerous and unemotional vegetation laid bare the malignant disease secretly festering in every book and every sign created by humans. I read somewhere that books treat solely of other books and that signs likewise refer to other signs; that a book has nothing to do with reality, but instead reality itself is a book since it is created by language. What was depressing about that doctrine was that it allowed reality to be hidden by our signs."» - Stephen Sparks


«The signs of connective tissue in the films of David Lynch are in places very clear. Beyond Lynch’s own mentioning of the mesh of words, most vocally between Mulhollland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE, but also, I would insist, between all the films, in many ways the blank or horrendous spaces that make the films seem the most ‘underneath the viewer’s skin’ are the creation of the space itself, a portal both from film to film, as well as, I must demand, into human.
The rips in spaces in Lynch are all throughout, and in many ways, the definitive space of Lynch: the totem-being behind Winky’s, Club Silencio, the Black Lodge, the pink house on the sound stage and the ‘other version’ of Hollywood & Vine in INLAND EMPIRE, the Rabbits, Ben’s house in Blue Velvet, the exploding shed in Lost Highway, perhaps the entire terrain of Eraserhead, etc., etc. You could list these rooms forever.
You could also list, in your own life, the spaces of your mind that are contained in memory or in associative practice: sleep rooms, childhood slurrings, ruined pictures, unrecorded thoughts, most any second mostly. That you could also not truly make this list is important too, as here is an example, in Lynch’s hands, perhaps, of what occurs in evidence of the reckoning:
Absorbing all of these spaces, I think, is the room displayed in the credit sequence of INLAND EMPIRE, the room where ‘Rita’ appears and sits and watches the logger cutting, the singing man, an Asian woman wearing a Laura Palmer-esque wig, the dance crew’s insanely mesmerizing performance of Nina Simone, and various other Lynch-pins, if you will, creating a kind of den within the film within the film, an anterior both to the Black Lodge and a space that operates for me as the crown and blood of the whole film, which seems interesting, in that it is used for the viewer as an exit, a segment that is usually walked out on, and also contains all the scrolling names of all the human bodies used to ‘create’ the film itself.
Also interesting is the hilariously off-putting and seemingly out-of-place (and therefore perfectly in-place) last bit of ‘actual film dialog’ that serves as a ‘key to the door’ of the sequence, a sex-rasped “Sweeeet.”
At the same time, it is these rips, these collusions and things not quite seen, but only hinted into what is not contained by the film, that give the film its sickening power.
Take, for instance, the ‘urban legend’ style discussion of what could be the presence of Laura Palmer in the Club Silencio scene of MULHOLLAND DRIVE (see this amazing post ‘Laura Palmer in Club Silencio?’, linked from the definitive MD fansite, which contains an incredible map of the spaces of the film, and a self-defeating crowd of theories, discussions, etc.)
Whether or not that actually is Sheryl Lee, there is something about the thought and the residue of this contention, and then underlying ‘unspokenness’ of it, that makes my whole body go rubbery.
[That I am writing all this down while someone is under my house banging with hammers, and the water is turned off, and in a half light through turquoise curtains, is quite right.]
These connective rooms, this blank space, space filmed and not filmed, the antithesis of the actual connectivity which instead then creates actual terrain not on the film and therefore somewhere else (where?): these are what make the body of the air milked in the Lynch rooms so full of and empty of light at the same time. The question of process in Lynch’s creation/tapping of these spaces I think is directly related to his process and mental openings, which is another discussion in itself. The connected disconnected. The unintentionally intentional. The accidental right-there.
Certainly, as well, Lynch’s affinity for lighting, electricity, doors, curtains, specific foods: these are organs in the massive body.
Some anagrams for the phrase INLAND EMPIRE: A Ripened Limn, Epidermal Inn, Impaled Inner, Melanin Pride, Inaner Dimple, A Primed Linen, Renamed Nil Pi.
Some anagrams for the phrase MULHOLLAND DRIVE: Landlord Veil Hum, Halved Dull Minor, Invader Mold Hull, Drain Hold Vellum, Lard Unmoved Hill, Damn Drivel Hullo, Human Devil Droll
All of this is stirring me, as it does most does in waking and nonwaking, even more so in the light of the book I am currently exactly halfway finished with, The Other City by Michal Ajvaz, which was released in 1993 in Czech and was recently rereleased in English from Dalkey Archive Press.
From the copy on the book: The Other City is a guidebook to this invisible, ‘other Prague,’ overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads.”
I read the first half of the book yesterday (exactly, to the page), and will read the second half tonight, and yet feel more equipped now to write about it in the context of the above than perhaps if I had finished.
Essentially, The Other City begins in a book shop, with a man finding a book among the others pressed, purple, full of a ruinic writing he has never seen. At first he glances, puts it back, but then returns and buys the book, and in his exploration of the text and its aura’s effect on his mind, finds himself on an unraveling inquest to a world that the book seems to be a cursor for (much in the way of the blue cube fro MD): a world contained between all the blank places among the everyday that most people overlook.
For instance, of these places, at one point the narrator finds himself, while walking along an old path, confronted by a sizable topped-off cylinder stuck in the ground, which he remembers having, as a child, hidden behind. There is a rusted stove door on the cylinder that he remembers having never been able to pry open, but in his coming across it now, it opens, large enough to stick a head in. Inside, in a strange light, he comes across a man delivering a strange sermon to a large congregation, discussing their unconscious exile from the city.
Among the long, strange-logicked speech, the man says something that in some way seems to refer to the nature of the craft I only hinted at above:
Why doesn’t he choose another typewriter? All the other typewriters have disappeared: some have been borne away to the Caucasus by a swarm of locusts (it is proven that, by joining forces, locusts are capable of carrying even a horse many miles), some typewriters are used as part of some kind of new perversion spreading through the cities, and some have been transformed into the white light illuminating the statue of the beautiful animal angel.
Later, when the narrator returns to try to get into the cylinder again, the door will no longer open.
The space of this room, and the other-logic of it (amazingly rendered in Ajvaz’s post-Kafka, hyper-hyper-aware prose), feels much like, and perhaps even embedded in or connected to, the rooms and spaces Lynch is able among our human lights to absorb.
The walls and beings of these spaces and these people, for Ajvaz, like Lynch, are right there among the everyday items and connectors we assume are ‘just things’ (a railway leading to the titular ‘other city’ runs through the heart of the ‘everyday’ town here, but is considered an old line, outdated, and is therefore not questioned, nor are the presence of these strange green shuttles that are said to appear in the city’s art, always there).
Though in Ajvaz’s spaces, the temper is even more, or at least differently, fantastic: sharks swim in snow, massive flower ceremonies intersect with ski lifts that intersect the the city; strange animal (tigers, bears, dogs) monsters that interact with humans; humans who seem clear on distinguishing themselves politically from the unknowing others, whereas in Lynch, the hidden peoples are murderers, rapists, loons.
The menace, though, in both looms hyper-real, to the point that it seems more real even than telephones or waking. A blood lymph laid around the everyday.
People with any experience of the ‘Other City’ in The Other City are continually interrupted, distracted, afraid.
Some anagrams for the phrase THE OTHER CITY: Itchy Thereto, Etch They Riot, Octet Heir Thy, Rich Teeth Toy, Retch Yet Oh It, Cry Eh Eh It Tot.
Another quote from the book (pg 51):
The T-bar dragged me up cold, dankly-reeling staircases of houses, lit by solitary light bulbs. I passed through dim hallways into a lobby. I shouted out when a figure suddenly appeared in front of me, but it was only my reflection in a big mirror above the shoe rack. I moved through the corners of bedrooms where people lay asleep. A man and a young woman were making love on a wide white bed; the girl heard the clatter and turned her head toward me, silently staring me in the eyes until I disappeared behind the closet. I was traveling through the interspace between the apartments whose existence is denied.
Ajvaz’s underground temples, mazelike buildings, dual presences, shifting languages (recall the Red Room backward speak), his terrains: books within books, worlds within worlds, ones that truly call attention to our daily walls and air, moves from room to room, the leaking.
[Such that, now that the banging in my house where I am writing this is silent, and the water has returned, I feel stranger now than when it had been gone.]
And such that, as I wait in this null space between halves of finishing my reading of Ajvaz, the doors seem even more open, looking, oh.]» - Blake Butler

«The Other City is an obscure novel, but a very important one. Michal Ajvaz's haunting, difficult prose is a bizarre, labyrinthine journey through Prague - the City of a Thousand Spires - that will leave you alternately breathless, laughing out loud, or utterly confused.
There is nothing remotely conventional about this book. You can quite literally get lost in it (just like the unnamed narrator), in the many hidden worlds it examines: entirely unknown, nocturnal realities coexisting with our own in the dark corners and midnight gardens of our own cities.
Prague itself is the most compelling character: an elegant, seductive, maddening mistress of snow-covered cobblestones and gothic spires. You will be dying to book a flight within the first few chapters. Yet the Prague we know is just a starting point:
"The frontier of our world is not far away...it glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings. Out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it. We are walking all the time along a shore and along the edge of a virgin forest."
The story begins in an old Prague bookshop where the narrator discovers an unmarked volume bound in purple velvet. The pages are filled with an indescribable, unknown alphabet that, when placed on his shelves at home, begins to spread and infect the pages of all the books nearby. In his quest to understand the strange book and its engravings of lost temples, the narrator stumbles in and out of an "other" Prague (the source of the unknown alphabet), an entire hidden, incomprehensible civilization existing on the fringes and in the hidden spaces of our own world.
I won't spoil the fun, but you can expect to wander through subterranean churches filled with glass sculptures (themselves filled with schools of fish); through gargantuan libraries filled with jungles and forgotten ruins where visitors often lose their way looking for a book, never to return; there are elk stables hidden in the hollows of Prague's statuaries, and night-classes at 3am in its universities on the history of unknown wars.
Ajvaz's magical realism is narratively complex, and very challenging to read. It requires focused attention just to finish one short chapter. You will get lost and confused, especially if you look for meaning or purpose in the bizarre rituals of the Other City.
In the end, the novel isn't narratively satisfying. There's no sense of progress, closure, or accomplishment, and the narrator never develops into a character in his own right. But reading The Other City is like having the most eccentrically beautiful dreams of your life, and then waking up and laughing at their brilliant absurdity.
Think of the chapters as prose poems instead of serialized episodes in a story, and you'll enjoy the book more. I highly recommend it, and it's short enough to read in a few sittings, but dense enough to come back to several times.» - Adam Morgan

Daniel Borzutzky - My lord is a big, brutal ruffian and his Godmen are bigger than your Godmen

Daniel Borzutzky, Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2007)

"'History, we are taught, is arbitrary, if there is any enjoyment to be derived from it, it is in the playfulness of its constant revision.(Daniel Borzutzky)
In his Arbitrary Tales, Daniel Borzutzky does not withhold from us the pleasures of narrative; for he does relate, in many of his texts - perhaps most of them - stories that have anecdotal intention, in addition to temporal and spatial extension. The tales are crowded with incidents and characters set against contemporary or medieval landscapes (or their cunning admixture), which receive from their creator sufficient specificity to make them real; i.e. they have the weight of fictitious place. Even in the case of
Little villages made entirely of dust and lint
Borzutzky's places have a Max Ernst-like strange familiarity, or familiar strangeness.
Incidents and characters are caused to proliferate to an astonishing degree and in an amazing diversity of forms. One is led to the inescapable conclusion that Borzutzky has elevated the notion of mutation and its corollary, morphology, to the principal theme of this work. (Are they not, in themselves, the essence of narrative art - of all art and of architecture, details of which latter discipline Borzutzky frequently imports into his fictions?) Borzutzky appropriates non-narrative forms, like the dramatic or operatic, for some of his tales, which have an enlarging and expansive effect, within the context of the whole. The identification and transmutation of form - social, with its insistence on ceremony (also significant to this writer), entomological and zoological organisms - these activities lie at the heart of Borzutzky's fiction.
He kissed her lips. She turned into a rat, then a flowerpot, then a story.
Like Raymond Roussel and Harry Mathews, Borzutzky claims for his at once spacious and cramped stories more freedom than readers of conventional fiction may be willing to allow. Like those two antecedent makers of writings, and like others we may admire, such as Donald Barthelme, Bruno Schulz, Kafka, Henri Michaux, and Kenneth Koch, Borzutzky is a fabulist, who constructs often brilliant machines, whose sole purpose seems, to us, to be to confound expectations of psychological or sociological depth; indeed, the tales avoid anything that might be called subtext. They are without metaphor. They are shallow in the Modernist sense that they adore the surface possibilities of art. Borzutzky's texts propose colorful inventions whose purpose is delight. This delight is abundantly ours in "An Arbitrary Tale," "Bed Time with William James," "The Lonely Man," or "How We Celebrate the Arrival of Spring," in which we are given a line that might well serve as statement of a theme concerning all the Arbitrary Tales: . . . it becomes increasingly obvious that the room is not one room but several rooms, that the world is not one world but several worlds, and that geometry and physics, though helpful, in the long run, can do little more than confuse us.
Not that each text is successful. The final two pieces in the collection, "War" and "Uncle Alberto in Exile," to our mind misfire in their implacable unspooling of narrative thread and, in the case of the second text, an experiment in sound that finally proves tedious.
At his best, Borzutzky composes fictions that are ravishing in the immaculate sentences with which they are constructed, in their verbal legerdemain, their rhythmic certainty, and in their primordial and human wish to elaborate a universe created entirely of words that is at least as bewildering and bewitching as that which is called real. Ultimately, we turn away from the contemplation of life and Borzutzky's art, knowing that:
We understood that we could not understand, and that this was the appeal of the wilderness.
For readers who wish to enter an inimitable wilderness of stories in order to pleasure in fiction's capacity to transfix and transfigure a man's experience, I recommend Arbitrary Tales." - Norman Lock

"It’s hard to say just how “arbitrary” the tales in Daniel Borzutzky’s first collection really are—the title begs to be taken ironically, and the first piece, “The History of Rights,” obliges. In it, the characters, all “brutal ruffians,” rough one another up, chanting “My lord is a big, brutal ruffian and his Godmen are bigger than your Godmen.” It’s a parable about the relationship between human aggression, imperialism, and organized religion that reads like something Daniil Kharms might have written if he hadn’t had Stalin to worry about.
As soon as we adjust to the idea of reading a volume of clever allegories, however, we come across the first of two stories entitled “An Arbitrary Tale,” in which a “genetically engineered dark-haired golden girl” encounters “a green martian with a dead squirrel around her neck.” From there the collection runs playfully amok, confronting ideology and the lack thereof, and appropriating, sometimes demolishing, received literary forms. In one story, William James “mowed the lawn each night wearing long pants, knee-high boots, a football helmet, and a pair of goggles”; in another, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s operas, a wax bust of Napoleon sings a litany of historical figures who “never meant shit to me”; and the final story, “Uncle Alberto in Exile,” crams as much narrative tension into 13 pages as you’re likely to find in some whole novels.
All of this experimentation might seem intimidating, or even tiresome, but Borzutzky’s prose is clean and often deadpan, and behind all of the calculation, there is a tenderness that allows one character to declare that he is “unable to deal with the pain of discovering that people hurt each other” and another to tell his lover “how nice it is to have someone to tell my stories to” without sentimentality—perhaps because the former is immediately snapped in the crotch and the latter subsequently renames God “Gork.”
Arbitrary indeed, then, though Tales is another issue altogether. The reader looking for an easy moral or a tidy denouement is likely to be disappointed by “Eight Unfinished Narratives,” not just because the narratives are incomplete, but because they’re juxtaposed in a list of 20 without indication of where one begins and another ends, leaving us to wonder whether Mother Earth’s etymology of the word “copulate” has anything to do with the man who “awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and found himself transformed into a cash register.”
There is one perspective, however, from which the term “tales” is undeniably appropriate — they’re nearly all told, as opposed to shown. And while there are times that the telling becomes tedious, as in “How We Celebrate the Arrival of Spring” and “War,” a pair of stories which document the quasi-religious civic celebrations of imaginary villages in such minute detail that they risk banality, it’s refreshing to see a young writer reject the first workshop commandment without fanfare and succeed so often." - Christian TeBordo
Daniel Borzutzky, The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVOX Books, 2006)

"One can say about Daniel Borzutzky's The Ecstasy of Capitulation what has rarely been said about poetry since the beginning of modernism: it's a hell of a lot of fun. That's under the assumption, of course, that one enjoys the occasional verbal crudity—which is also a precursor for enjoying Borzutzky's poems. Inheritor of postmodernity's ambivalence towards language, meaning, and sincerity, Borzutzky's genius is to build instead on tone, relativist interpretations of historical events, and fetishized eros.
Raised in Pittsburg, bilingual child of Chilean parents, Borzutzky's migratory family history, passing through a continent which has produced generations of politically radical poets, is perhaps one of the things which prevents him from straying into complete absurdism. For contemporary poets, this is not merely a matter of taste, but a struggle with the aftermath of Theory. “Especially among young poets,” Tony Hoagland writes, “there is a widespread mistrust of narrative forms, and, in fact, a pervasive sense of the inadequacy or exhaustion of all modes other than the associative.” The lyric "I" still exists, but only in a stew of dissociated nouns and verbs. Even when content is couched in full context, poems resist discursiveness by turning away into image or absurdity. In a language already ravished by the vernacular of corporatization, bureaucratization, medicalization, and high technology, poets no longer ask themselves how something should be said, but whether anything can be said at all—resorting to fractured narratives and fractured syntax in the face of postmodernity's nihilism and relativism.
Structuring a poem becomes difficult when we can count on neither content nor the meanings of words themselves. There are many options, one of which is to simply embrace postmodernism's inherent aesthetic—and the itinerant political implications of cultural relativism. Borzutzky prefers instead to work subtly against postmodernism. His syntactic strategies mirror closely those of absurdist poets, but he cleverly injects thin strings of narrative, using historical events and speakers, and the tone of these speakers, to give his poems coherence. His specialty is a manic, obsessive jargon peppered with legalisms, bureaucratic and corporate newspeak, and a positively twenty-first century fanaticism. “Almost unnoticed,” the speaker declares in “Sharp Teeth of Death: An Essay on Poets and their Poetics,” “poets have continuously battled the human race for domination of the earth.” It's the kind of hyperbole you'd expect from Jerry Falwell, Joseph McCarthy, or the mentally flaccid man who was my high school principal:
[P]oets not only inflict social but economic losses on their human enemy by robbing them of food they may need for survival.
There is no question that civilization's worst enemy is the poet, who outdoes all wild beasts in destruction of lives and property. Poets cause more damage than all other tyrants combined.
The savage officialism of the speaker, given over to this ridiculous topic (who, after all, could imagine poets agreeing long enough to inflict “economic losses”), is positively reinvigorating. The speaker's tone, which we all recognize from Fox News, from Hollywood's stock fanatics, and from our daily lives, should we happen to live in a rural area, is the real connective tissue of these poems.
And, it's hilarious.
The poems are strongest when structured by an historical or social context. It is in these poems where Borzutzky's talent for humor shines, and it is these poems at which a casual, non-writerly audience roars with laughter. In “Ronald Reagan in Berlin,” President Reagan begins his public address with: “Dear Mr. Gorbachev, if we are together/ Again do not spank me upon my bare buttocks.”
Reagan goes on to describe the effects of such spanking, and to describe an elaborate dream in which he was “a stallion who produced both male and female/ Sex hormones,” the First Lady Nancy was “a castrated male dog/ Who attempted to nurse young puppies,” and Mr. Gorbachev was:
a caponed hen who ceased
To crow, grew a cocks-comb and attempted
Husbandry with other hens.
Reagan describes how, in the dream, he, Nancy, and Mr. Gorbachev are able to converse with a variety of creatures: “ducks,/ Geese, puppies, rabbits, kittens, and chipmunks,” as well as “sails, worms, beetles, and toads.” Delightfully, the poem does not forsake its origins, but doubles back to the original 1987 speech and its memorable lines:
Liberalization,
Mr. Gorbachev, is how we were able to understand
The language of these little animals. Tear down this
Wall, Mr. Gorbachev. Thank you, and God bless you all.
The humor of such a poem, beyond the sexual uber-fantasies, is the staging, the fact that Reagan delivers his emasculating speech to the citizens and government officials of West Berlin and all who listen from the other side of the wall and by radio or television. Notice that in this poem, Borzutzky is at once postmodern and not. He has fractured narrative, by offering a reinterpretation of Reagan's original speech, which is a typical relativist technique. Yet he uses the tone of the speaker and the absurd narrative formed by the speaker's sexual fantasy to formulate a second, complete narrative—which is opposed to the contemporary postmodern aesthetic manifest in pure absurdism. Borzutzky knows that his poem lives because the original speech exists as an historical event.
One fad of postconfessional poets still closely affiliated with narrative has been to write beautifully-crafted, ahistorical poems featuring historical figures, especially artists, scientists, and musicians. The assumption is that, while recent history is now a matter of relativist interpretation, Renaissance history, Romance history, ancient Greek history, and even the first few centuries of capitalist industrialization exist forever in a series of picturesque freeze-frames safely preceding deconstruction's wall of flame. Borzutzky is not one of these. He ranges too far afield of sincerity. And his poems depend heavily on the history they deconstruct. In the end, he is too loyal to historical narrative to entirely disclaim it.
Yet Ecstasy is not a book of protest or even analysis. The bombast in “Richard Milhous Nixon's First Inagural Address” is not a politicized characterization of Nixon. It is play, funmaking, the strategy of which is to exaggerate—with the tone of public speech and a clever modification of content—the simpleminded hypocrisy we now accept in all public figures:
I ask you to share with me today the majesty of squirrel-headed otters.
...
The spiraling evolution of humanity allows us the possibility of combining animals, of unions between gorillas and hippos, advances that once would have taken centuries.
Additional poems make blasphemous use of the vernacular of economics: “Oh Fidelity Low-Priced Mutual Fund, stick things in me/ as I stick things in you.” “Inflationary Module” from “Desire: 7 Modules,” is a brilliant combination of economic jargon and fetishized eros:
I want to make it with you, baby,
but misguided central planning
has led to a pervasive misallocation of capital.
The central bank is closed, baby,
and I cannot make a deposit.
And one must address the sexual content of Ecstasy. It's about time someone rescued sex from sentimental, heterosexual, Confessional poets. It's about time someone treated sex like the game it's become. Like Borzutzky's approach to capitalized, corporatized diction, his use of sexual fantasy is refreshingly hyperbolic, so over the top that taking it seriously might cause mental strain. Sex, like meaning and Marxism, has become a kind of non-content under postmodernism—a Flash ad in the header of a Web site, a billboard passed every day on the morning commute. Gen-X-ers are accustomed to sex talk, accustomed to Dan Savage and leather stores and cock rings and the need to articulate one's preferred sub-genre of porn. Borzutzky's eros isn't shocking so much as timely.
Sometimes absurdity gets the better of a poem, and the slew of tangential nouns and verbs renders it unwieldy. Like a magnet dragged across a junkyard accumulating nuts, bolts, nails, washers, and cast-off droplets of welded metal, eventually the magnet itself is no longer visible. Some poems of Ecstasy still struggle with postmodern dissociation. “The news/ says the news has disappeared,” reports the speaker of “Away.” “Simple Present” attempts the following lines:
I only think of you when I do not
think of you. Conversely, when I
think of you, I do not think of you.
There is nothing, of course, wrong with such poems, except for the fact that they have been written, by various authors, several thousand times since the Surrealists had their start in the 1920s. Terry Eagleton describes the “postmodern consensus against norms, unities and consensus” in After Theory. “In this social order, then, you can no longer have bohemian rebels or revolutionary avant-gardes because they no longer have anything to blow up.” Language poetry and absurdism, one might conjecture from such a statement, rally against the long-dead bourgeois of Baudelaire. Far more interesting are the poems where Borzutzky opposes postmodern aesthetics—and succeeds.
Also, it's a hell of a lot of fun." - Amy Groshek




Daniel Borzutzky, one size fits all (Scantily Clad Press, 2009)

Read it at: http://issuu.com/andrewlundwall/docs/danielborzutzky-onesizefitsall


"Daniel Borzutzky’s echap, one size fits all, published by Scantily Clad Press, opens with a dramatic bang of phallic imagery with, "In My Numb heart a Priack of Misgiving." References to Milton seep out through Borzutzky’s dry sardonic humor: “The best poet in our town lives in a cage at PetsRUs and says fuck the son of a bitch every time a customer walks by.” the prick of misgiving being the parrot at the pet store repeating, "fuck the son of a bitch…." "Crazy Jane Finds a Dog" is engaging and awesome: "looking onto this land of piss, I exalt… my own lethargy… Hide with the white bitch in the mud, praying not to be devoured." We have the alchemy of trash and sewage. The ending, "Now that I take care of the white bitch, I have gained the respect of my family," proves you don’t have to be a winner to win.
Borzutzky’s poetry is a strange exotic and eclectic conglomerate of words. I read and wonder, who is this dude? Sometimes I understand what he is saying from one sentence to the next and other times I sit there wondering if I have any idea. Sometimes a sentence follows the thoughts and sequence of the one before; sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t exactly know what to do, so I follow along because he’s strange enough to make me want to. Although I read the lines in bewilderment I laugh and feelings are aroused.
I laugh at certain lines then go back to the last line trying to figure how it fits. I read and reread "In My Numb heart a Prick of Misgiving."
"If you cannot sex this poem then listen harder.
The wind has fallen."
I visualize the scenario from his poems with his unique illustrations and I treasure his concepts like the one discussed above in "Crazy Jane"; you don’t have to be a winner to win. From the title poem, "one size fits all," I see: "The poet forgot to shake off his penis and pee dripped on the manuscript that he submitted to the 2007 University of Iowa Poetry Prize" combines poetic masturbation with pissing in the wind. Sometimes you may as well scratch your ass instead of your head for all the good anything will do you in society’s grip.
Mr. Borzutzky has trapped me and remade me in his image. This collection is written for the poet exorcising familiar demons in spurts of more traditional views and references. The general notion being if you haven't lived it how could you possibly write about it and if you did live it would you be crazy enough to write it and if you did write it would anybody understand or read it... right? I laugh and go back to what I read before. I think that could be me, that is me he’s talking about not only himself. I relate to the artist’s lament about how the industry prostitutes ethics.
"The problem, said the critic, remains one of imagination and its insistence on the distinction between thought and action." We all have to live with criticism, poets especially, since strong and different works always raise suspicions and hard penises. "Poetry lives here, she replied, but he will chop you up and kill you, and then he’ll cook you and eat you," along with attachable and detachable prosthetics to demonstrate how we either give or shed an artificial piece of ourselves — very unique imagery and this is what makes Borzutzky more cool. A daring risk-taker appeals to me. "I vomit a poem onto a stack of bloody cows and win a Pushcart prize." I do understand — I think I do…
"Budget Cuts" makes a similar point: "And the semen are in their testicles and Hamlet is a faceless robot who is president of the rotary," and I can’t say why it makes me smile. The point is poets are poor – we don’t make money off of what we love to do. Pity…
one size fits all closes with "Suddenly I was old, and had no one to fucking talk to," the classic death of the poet. Borzutzky outright admits that poetry becomes the property of the reader once published... woohoo :), I like that! "I do not own this poem; it is the responsibility of the poetic community." And, "If you can’t feel the tickle on your genitals that this poem provides, please masturbate safely within the confines of rubber walls and maybe then size won’t matter."
What I like the most is that Daniel Borzutzky does not fit the mold. I like his differences, the folly and play in his voice, his humor and sarcasm; I feel his triumph and growth develop. The voice of Marguerite Duras mixes with Milton and “the colored girls go.” I can ask for no more; I’m getting all the visceral stimulation I need." - Joy Leftow

Zachary Mason - Odysseus in the Borgesland: Alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homeroids

Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Starcherone Books, 2007)

«Following the structure of the ancient Greek classic, The Lost Books of the Odyssey features alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original Odyssey and, equipped as well with a faux-authoritative scholarly introduction, richly carries off the illusion of being the lost ur-text of Homer's masterpiece. Justifying comparison with the great postmodern fictive hoaxes of Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Coover, this is a one-of-a-kind book destined to become a classic in its own right. The Lost Books of the Odyssey was selected for the Starcherone Fiction Prize by final judge Carole Maso in Starcherone Books's 4th annual blind-judged competition.»

"Mason's book is incredibly impressive. Beautifully written, intelligent, war-inflected in all the most ancient and contemporary ways, filled with all kinds of pleasures. An ambitious feast!" Carole Maso

"A stirring revelation: Zachary Mason's astounding glosses of The Odyssey plunge us into an unforeseeable and hypnotic dimension of fiction. Of the three possible interpretations of the work that he proposes - Homeric stories anciently reproduced by recombining their components, a Theosophist dream of abstract mathematics, and pure illusion (that is, it was all made up by him) - the result is one and the same. This enthralling book is his doing, whether as translator, conjuror, or author. I vote for number three." - Harry Mathews

"That each story is all stories, that the tale foretells the teller's life, that the poem kills its hero, that one word will suffice, that all times are today, that everything changes, that nothing changes - from these riddles Zachary Mason crafts his book. It encodes the astonishments others promised to decipher, the secret of secrets, the last meaning. We feel its mysteries within our grasp, just a page away. Even this is prefigured. This is the book I always meant to write." - R. M. Berry

«From the time I was eight up until a little over a week ago, I truly believed that no one in this world could match my blind infatuation with the oddities, obscenities, and romantic notions of Greek mythology. I will even go so far as to divulge that, at the tender age of ten, after weeping unapologetically in a literature class upon realizing that Persephone would not be able to return to the earthly world because she had eaten six measly pomegranate seeds, I actually begged my mother to buy one of these “mysterious” fruits so I could relish the sensation that enslaved Persephone to Hades, king of the underworld. Of course, in Michigan in the 1980s, pomegranates were ridiculously expensive; I bit into a three-dollar piece of fruit as if it were an apple and, though it tasted like pesticides and cement, I felt a closer connection to my mythology fantasy world.
Enter The Lost Books of the Odyssey and its author, Zachary Mason, in whom I have either found my match or my soul mate.
Lost Books is the story of Odysseus, but is also not the story of Odysseus. In forty-four short chapters, Mason explores several hundred possibilities of how the Odyssey could have been. He manages not only to unearth the most obscure trivia surrounding the mythic lives of every character, but also manufacture new trivia by expounding on lost footnotes and random accounts recorded somewhere in suspended time. Mason defines each character—Patroclus, Helen, Paris, Athena, et. al.—filling out every epic hero with the psychological dimensions we (or maybe just I) have attributed to them since we first heard the myth of Achilles and his accursed heel.
Did the original story of the immortal-but-doomed Achilles delve into the warrior’s fascination with the wounded, the revulsion he felt toward the dead and burned? I don’t recall that nifty tidbit in any of my books. But perhaps we’ve always taken the basic information, the classic elements of melodrama, and filled in our own blanks. “Wounds fascinated Achilles,” Mason writes:
When Patroclus got a scratch Achilles would fuss over him like an old nurse, endlessly bandaging and salving what could as well be left alone. But when a Greek was mortally wounded, even one of his own men, Achilles would not so much as look at him. When the bodies of the fallen were wound in orange sheets and burned on a pyre, Achilles was always elsewhere.
Mason’s tales are versions of recurring dreams. In one chapter, Odysseus could very well have killed and scalped Helen to end the war; in the next, he does not kill her, instead steals away and marries her. All our characters’ faces are undefined, but we recognize them wholly as we would any cast of characters filing through our dreams—faces disappearing just as we move to get a better look, morphing into others, circumstantially. And, just as in dreams, they are all of a weighty importance, seeming always to mean more than what can be explained on the surface. Mason plays with this idea quite a bit. He writes that there is “one image in a warped hall of mirrors.” At another point, Odysseus describes himself as “a hand trying to grasp itself by reaching into a mirror.” Earlier on, Odysseus, actually having read The Odyssey in this chapter, says, “The essential insight is that the text is corrupt, or, if not corrupt, then incomplete, or of a calculated obscurity.”
With these continual narrative hints that something is indeed amiss, Mason makes no apologies for the meandering narratives, understanding the value of contrivance in storytelling, scoffing at the contemporary obsession with deftly “realistic” plotlines, and thumbing his nose with humorous asides and sparse footnotes that attempt to “explain” situations more clearly by adding two or three more tortuous forks to the hazy dream-road. A perfect example is “Record of a Game,” a chapter riddled with possible falsehoods that attempts to explain the origins of chess and its direct descent from The Iliad.
I have to say that for all this analysis, what I most wanted to do was just reproduce some of Mason’s amazingly beautiful lines, but to start excerpting all the pages I dog-eared would quickly exceed fair-use provisions. I cannot begin to express the fluidity of Mason’s language, how each word has been painstakingly chosen to fill its sentence as though no other word were possible. Which brings me to one of my few true criticisms: This book is not a novel. Experimentalists may disagree, but I think of this book as a series of vignettes whose collective impression sustains a novelistic momentum. I might just as easily argue that Lost Books is actually an exquisite book of poetry, meditations on the same theme—but I refuse to consign language this good to the care of poets only. Fiction should be this meticulously beautiful, too.
In the end, I don’t care how we classify The Lost Books of the Odyssey. Good, inspiring, lasting literature needs no more classification. I suppose I’m a bit biased by my attachment to the subject matter, but that just means Zachary Mason could have failed more easily than succeeded in his resurrection of The Odyssey. It is lucky for me that he succeeded.» - A Wolfe

«Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey would seemingly qualify as a "novel" only if we define the form in the barest possible terms: a lengthy composition in prose. Puporting to be a decoded translation of a series of "extra" episodes of The Odyssey (decoded because, according to the translator, who provides an introduction to the book that has now been made of them, they have existed as an encrypted manuscript the means of decrypting which has only recently been discovered), it bears no resemblance to the sort of unified narrative most readers expect to find in a novel. There is no plot other than the preexisting plot of the Odyssey, on which the "lost books" perform multiple variations. Similarly, while Odysseus is presumably the protagonist (if it isn't the "translator"), many different versions of Odysseus, assuming many different roles, are presented in the 46 episodes comprising The Lost Books. The stories are told from many different points of view, both first-person and third-person (one of the most affecting of the tales is told by the Cyclops, lamenting his blindness at the hands of Odysseus (and for whom he expresses great hatred)), and while one might read the tales simply as a collection of stories, this would rob them of the coherence they ultimately attain as a set of imaginative supplements to the Odyssey narrative - taken together, they form a kind of anti-Odyssey, an implicit commentary on the Homeric version of the story achieved by highlighting its elisions and sounding out its interstices.
Such a strategy does require some familiarity on the reader's part with the Odyssey itself, since the effects created by this sort of rewriting and rearranging to an extent do depend on our recognition that an episode from Homer's text has been recast - Odysseus returns to Ithaca to find his people "all astonishment and delight" and Penelope dead, Achilles abandons the Green encampment to do good works in the world, perhaps to spend "a year in contemplation in the shadow of a tree" - or a character or episode has been enhanced or freshly emphasized. While it is certainly possible that the reader only minimally acquainted with both The Iliad and The Odyssey would still find Mason's alternative versions diverting enough, the humor and the wit embodied in Mason's counter-narratives, as well as the cleverness of their construction, will surely strike the Odyssey-literate with more force and efficacy than those who know Homer's epic only in its barest outlines, if at all. By no means is The Lost Books of the Odyssey a book to be enjoyed only by classicists, but it helps to be a reader with an interest in literature, and The Odyssey's role in its history, that overshadows whatever interest most readers of novels profess to have in encountering "real life" in fiction.
Despite these potential obstacles to a broad audience for a book like The Lost Books of the Odyssey, it is, in my opinion, nevertheless a work of "experimental" fiction that many readers would find enjoyable if they were to give it a chance. Not only are many of the invented episodes entertaining in their own right, but gradually one comes to anticipate what new twist on the Odysseus story Mason will offer, in a way that is almost analogous to the pleasurable anticipation readers feel when looking forward to the next turn of plot in a conventional narrative. Equally rewarding is the opportunity to reflect further on the Homeric themes of war, honor, leadership, and sacrifice, which, if anything, are accentuated even more intensely (if at times ironically) through the liberties taken with the story of the Trojan War (e.g., the chapter narrated by Odysseus that begins, "I have often wondered whether all men are cowards like I am") and through the parallels that might be drawn between this re-told Odyssey and our own ongoing, ill-conceived war. The Borgesian frame provided by the translator's introduction and an appendix relating the history of the lost books contributes an additional tongue-in-cheek element that completes the novel's masquerade as a feat of "scholarship."
For me, the most successful works of experimental fiction always "entertain," even when they reject or subvert the usual devices conventionally considered the source of fiction's ability to entertain - the devices that create "compelling characters," dramatic narratives, "vivid" settings, etc. (Gilbert Sorrentino's novels provide a good example of this ability to entertain while dispensing with the standard accoutrements of entertainment.) In experimental fiction of the postmodern kind, this is frequently accomplished through comedy and satire. In the case of The Lost Books of the Odyssey it is achieved through what might simply be called ingenuity, along with a certain amount of chutzpah. This may or may not be an approach all readers can appreciate, but I found this novel a pleasure to read nevertheless, and I highly recommend it.» - Daniel Green

"Whenever the great classicist Arthur Way was asked about the perils of the undertaking, he’d always answer with the glimmer of a smile in his eyes: “Well, that’s the trouble with ‘writing Homer’ … Homer did it first, you see.”
He was making a point regarding the toughest act in the world to follow, and he knew what he was talking about: in 1945 he took on the task of translating into English Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomeric, a long and detailed epic telling of what happened between the death of Hector – with which the Iliad concludes – and the fall of Troy. Quintus Smyrnaeus’ book has been enjoyed by readers hungry for more Homer since it was written in the fourth century, but it’s a maddening book: the critical mind wants to believe it’s got some kind of sanction, that Quintus was working from material we no longer have. This material would be the so-called ‘Cyclic Poets’ who first chronicled this story in the wake of Homer: the Aethiopis and Iliupersis of Arctinus, the Little Iliad of Lesches, etc. But even to the untrained eye, Quintus seems to be making rather free with his sources… Arthur Way was not the first scholar to wonder if he wasn’t in main part just making stuff up.
To a classicist, the thought is heresy, which is why classicists have always been the killjoys of the intellectual world. In truth, Quintus – whoever he was – probably couldn’t help himself. Homer is the beginning, the great inexhaustible font for so much of Western literature that he’s attracted hopeful collaborators since the moment his works saw the light of day. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all try their hand at adapting his elemental drama for their own more specific ends, and when classical learning returns to the West ten centuries later, fiddling around with Homer returns just as promptly, with Chaucer leading the effort in his Troilus and Creseyde, a full-out masterpiece that wouldn’t be nearly so effective if it weren’t standing on Homer’s shoulders, plying us with invention after invention whose cleverness works so well precisely because it’s playing off a text we all know already.
After Chaucer, the list is practically endless. Shakespeare takes up the story of Troilus and Cressida himself; a thriving anonymous poetry-cycle centers on the love between Achilles and Patroclus; every great translator, similarly, makes subtle alterations, little changes to let the reader know that they were here, that they made the works their own even while they were striving to disappear into them.
The 20th century ran rampant with ‘writing Homer.’ The Internet age may well see the great and final flowering of the novel as it had been known to all ages before, and so it’s perhaps fitting that the age so consistently looked back to the beginning of all secular, popularist entertainment, to Homer and his endless, endlessly transmuting matter. A long roster of writers went hunting in Homer for the themes that spoke to each in turn, and the result are books that couldn’t be much more different from Homer in their aims and executions – but which couldn’t exist at all without him.
Christopher Morley’s Trojans and Greeks talk like early 20th century enlisted men; there’s an Edwardian aura surrounding their pranks and slang. The century’s greatest writer of historical fiction, Mary Renault, chose to avoid working in Homer’s shadow (although she does mine the same approximate time period, the 6th century B.C., in her two novels starring Theseus), but such reluctance is on display nowhere else: the film The Private Life of Helen of Troy was adapted from a book that had already been a best-seller, and the book and movie spawned innumerable imitators that came and went out of print in the middle of the century. Science fiction writer Marion Zimmer Bradley followed up her groundbreakingly feminist retelling of the Arthurian cycle, The Mists of Avalon, with her version of the Siege of Troy as told from poor prophetic Cassandra’s point of view in The Firebrand, which sold enormously and introduced a whole new generation to Homer’s characters.
The waning years of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st have seen a renaissance in this peculiar sub-genre, as more and more writers allowed themselves more and more liberties with the canon. Perhaps the most traditional of all these was Sarah Franklin’s Daughter of Troy, which imagined the story from the viewpoint of captured war-maiden Briseis and which positively bristles with wry humor and pointed insight. Elizabeth Cook’s slim novel Achilles burns away the fat of the story into raw bullet points of almost poetic precision, as in her version of the death of Hector:
Achilles takes his sword too. After the day’s slaughter the divine blade still flashes like the sun. There is all the time he could ever want. He looks Hector over, scanning the armour that fits him so well, searching for a place to insert his blade. Like a lover taking in every inch of his beloved as they lie in the hot sun. All the time he could want, no rush, no fear of missing.
There is one point where the armour does not close over Hector. The tender diamond hollow between the clavicles is naked. Achilles fits his sword’s tip here.
Slowly, evenly, the pressure mounting, he pushes.
In the world of music, Suzanne Vega, in her song Calypso, re-imagines Odysseus’ long stay with the eponymous nymph, who in Vega’s lyrics emerges as sympathetic – but still possessing the self-deluding stubbornness we find in Homer (where she’s summarily ordered by the gods to release her captive but still contrives to make it sound like her own decision):
My name is Calypso. I have let him go.
In the dawn he sails away, to be gone forevermore.
And the waves will take him in again, but he’ll know their ways now.
I will stand upon the shore with a clean heart and my song in the wind.
The sand may sting my feet, and the sky will burn.
It’s a lonely time ahead. I do not ask him to return.
I let him go. I let him go.
Barry Unsworth treats the material in his best book, The Songs of the Kings. Mark Merlis gives the whole story a gay-hustler makeover in The Arrow of Time. John Barton spawned an epic ten-hour stage version of the story in Tantalus. In black and white comics, Eric Shanower is bringing us the entire Homeric saga and every possible detour (and, in something of a narrative feat, entirely without the presence of the gods), in Age of Bronze. Perhaps most impressively, the last fifty years have seen the slow, incremental publication of Christopher Logue’s utterly unique – and utterly Homeric – War Music:
Odysseus and Calypso, by Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901)
‘There’s Bubblegum!’ ‘He’s out to make his name!’
‘He’s charging us!’ ‘He’s prancing!’ ‘Get that leap!’
THOCK! THOCK!
‘He’s in the air! ‘Bubblegum’s in the air!’ ‘Above the dust!’
‘He’s lying on the sunshine in the air!’ ‘Seeing the Wall!’ ‘The arrows to keep him up!’
THOCK! THOCK!
‘Ole!’ ‘He’s wiggling in the air!’ ‘They’re having fun with him!’
‘He’s saying something!’ ‘Bubblegum’s last words!’
‘He’s down!’ ‘He’s in the dust!’ ‘Bubblegum’s in the dust!’
‘They’re stripping him!’ ‘They’re stripping Bubblegum!’
‘Close!’
‘Close!’
‘You can’t see anything!’
‘His mother sold her doves to buy his plate!’
‘You can’t see who to kill!’
So it’s to a deep and varied tradition that Zachary Mason now adds his own voice, in his new novel (or else a piece of one), The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
The aforementioned Arthur Way once remarked that the two qualities necessary for ‘writing Homer’ are ‘an ear for words’ and ‘a touch of lunacy.’ The reader will observe from the little biography of Mason provided in the book that he’s quite likely to have both:
Zachary Mason was educated at Trinity College, the University of Michigan, and the Sorbonne. He is currently the John Shade Professor of Archeocryptography and Paleomathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford. He divides his time between Oxford and the Greek island of Ogygia. He lives with his cats, Talleyrand and Penthesilia.
Even the least wary reader will get the sense that our author has a, shall we say, playful relationship with what is commonly known as the truth, but a moment’s reflection shows this to be a perfect stance; Odysseus, in his many voyages home, is forever refashioning himself, as is the truth he claims to embody.
Mason’s book is one of unabashed lyricism, a manuscript broken up into 46 chapters and no straightforward narrative line. These are glimpses, varying in length but none very long, turning on various points of the Homeric myth-cycle (despite the title, the fragments cover a good deal more matter than just Homer’s Odyssey), generally combining to yield a picture of Odysseus and the various stages of his life. Mason’s command of English prose is soaringly intelligent, and his ability to evoke the strange and the wondrous is as hard and swift as a poet’s:
In lassitude after love Odysseus asks Circe, “What is the way to the land of the dead?”
Circe answers, “You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off a layer, but find that not only is there another beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle. By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last you push away a piece of coarse, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes.”
This is the most beguiling strand of a generally beguiling book, this way Mason has of gorgeously dramatizing how alien the world-views are of the various supernatural beings who populate his story. Since this is the story of Odysseus, the book will necessarily have much of Athena in it, and Mason imparts to her a strangeness and a yearning all her own:
Water-logged, frozen, exhausted. Odysseus clung to a floating spar, dark waves surging over him. He could not help but think that this was happening to someone else, that someone, a stranger, was being consumed by the sea, was near drowning. His teeth had long since stopped chattering when a were-light appeared on the waters and his mind went from pain to dullness to clarity – Pallas Athena was with him. He said, Goddess, who are you, to find me and bear me up when I am lost in the waste? In the sudden stillness she said:
Water flowing through pipes, pouring into unlit reservoirs there to eddy in silence. Runes of ephemeral fire. A book of many pages written in inks that vanish and reappear. A twilight forest haunted by beasts, watchful and inquisitive. Steadfast of heroes. An onion, an ocean, a palimpsest, a staccato machine of oiled iron gears. These are among the metaphors with which I describe myself, like a hand trying to grasp itself by reaching into a mirror.
And not just Athena’s voice, but her relationship with Odysseus: Mason creates a kind of bond between the two, lopsided, awkward, and unprecedented in the dealings of gods and men. This can be tricky stuff to write – more than one adaptor of Homer has lingered over this particular relationship, to get it exactly right, as Mason obviously has:
She carried me through the war. Nestor said he had never seen a god so openly love a mortal and I suppose it is true. So much so, in fact, that my friendships with other men were strained – more than once I overheard someone call me uncanny and some of the Achaeans made the sign against the evil eye when I passed. But I did not care – their fear added to my mystique and made them pliable, easy to manipulate, and anyway I had her.
Like so many Homeric interpreters before him in the last century, Mason decides to inject his proceedings with many anachronistic modern notes and tones. Characters think and act with almost exclusively modern sensibilities – they speak of psychoanalysis, of China and India, of young girls’ ‘coming out’ in society, and the like. This adds a good deal of fun to The Lost Books of the Odyssey, as well as some nifty juxtapositions with freighted mythic iconography. In one fragment, Odysseus steals up on three mysterious women conversing in the dark. The reader will think of the Weird Sisters from Macbeth, perhaps – and will be drawn up short, delightedly so, by the entirely modern diction:
“Ten years is ten years, no matter how you cut it,” said one, brandishing a cooking knife. “You can interpret all you want but the facts are inescapable.”
“Mere simple-minded literalism,” said another, using a ladle to stir a tarnished copper pot on a tripod all but swallowed by the flames. “If it said he was to be brave like an eagle, would you have him plucking mice out of fields and climbing a tall tree to sit on a nest of sticks and guard an egg? It is understood to be a guideline, an indication to be fleshed out as required by the details of the situation, and not an exact recipe…”
“It is exactly a recipe, only far more binding,” said the first in a voice like a fast, cold wind.
“…unless you’re a blockhead,” finished the second.
“Blockhead yourself, Miss I-shall-do-as-I-please-for-it-is-only-a-guideline,” said the first. “I beg your pardon most humbly, great Madame. I never meant to imply that one as august as yourself should be obliged to be bound by the iron chains of necessity.”
“Tut. There is some room to move within those chains, and I say he has suffered enough,” replied the second.
“He has not begun to suffer,” said the third, whom Odysseus now saw was the fairest and most terrible. “If he got home now he would be unmarked. His suffering, as you are pleased to call it, would be the stuff of tales to enliven the winter of his old age, stories for his grandchildren. Fie on you. We will draw him thin and fine.”
The book is full of such marvelous stuff, and weighed against it in the balance is one thing, but it’s a big thing: conceit. Not the ‘is my hair just perfect-does my butt look big in this?’ kind of conceit, but rather the hoary old gremlin so well known to undergraduate English majors: the organizing trick, the gimmick by which the author feels compelled to tell his story. Countless promising novels have been fatally marred by their author’s weakness for conceit, and The Lost Books of the Odyssey very nearly shares their fate. Conceits are just that deadly.
Mason’s conceit in The Lost Books of the Odyssey is both unoriginal and incredibly distracting, a potentially lethal combination. The unoriginal part can be guessed from that author bio: he poses his book as the genuine article, an actual fragment of the lost post-homerica that perhaps lay open on Quintus of Smyrnaea’s desk while he was working seventeen centuries ago. These Lost Books disgorge their mysteries only when plied with cutting-edge cryptographic algorithms, but aside from the mathematical mumbo-jumbo, the device isn’t at all different from the one countless Sherlock Holmes pastiche-writers have been using for a century: this is Doctor Watson’s battered tin dispatch box, only with algebra.
Which would be bad enough and could be safely confined to the introduction and the historical appendix, if it weren’t for the second part, the distracting part, because, alas, Mason keeps picking at his conceit, ill-advisedly proud of the gimmick he’s created. The whole ‘I’m-just-transmitting-what-the-cryptology-tells-me’ gambit is a blank check for him to indulge in any little fixation he wants, such as the disastrously out of place chapter on modern-day chess, which necessitates this excruciating footnote:
This chapter is clearly a late addition to The Lost Books. The language is credible Homeric Greek, but the contents are, at the earliest, late Renaissance and the tone is more scholarly than narrative. The text of this chapter is the most corrupt of any in The Lost Books. There are long sequences of uninterpretible triplets that are, most probably, due to errors in encoding. I have therefore been obliged to use greater license in this chapter’s translation.
And lest the reader think this amount of hyperventilating (instead of merely excising the goddamn chess-digression, for Pete’s sake) is as bad as these distractions get, sample this little elucidation:
Mathematically, the structure of this chapter is this: the nth section encapsulates the telling of the n+1th section, is encapsulated by the n-1th, is a continuation of the n+2th, where all section numbers are computed modulo the total number of sections. Since the number of sections is odd, each section ends up containing, contained by, continuing, and continued by every other section.
Got that? Everybody still enjoying themselves?
That such gallimaufry might be intended by its author as tongue-in-cheek cannot possibly matter: the act of so regularly drawing attention to the scaffolding of the story only weakens the spell of the thing overall. Not simply dumping this burden of exegesis is the telltale mistake of a first-time novelist (or, ever so much worse, it’s a conscious gesture toward some species of dippy poststructuralism). Talleyrand and Penthisilia might have known better.
Still, amazingly, it does not scupper the book, and for that miraculous fact Mason has only his own linguistic virtuosity to thank. His writing is so spellbinding, so fluid and suggestive, that any irritation the reader may have felt at his gimmickry is washed away time and again by the sheer symphony of his invention. When it’s not tediously explaining itself, this is very much a book to get lost in – much as Odysseus is lost, going from one possible mythic future to another as the story-fragments spin forward:
Perhaps he went through each scene of his life and held it fixed in his mind’s eye until it disappeared. Eventually even his most vivid memories (the first time he touched Penelope’s skin, falling overboard and gasping just as a wave broke over his face) would fade to burnt-out after-image. Then, perhaps, he contaminated and diluted the remaining fragments of memory, rearranging them in every possible permutation: Penelope as a vapid giggler with apple green eyes, Penelope as a heavy immovable woman whose chief pleasure is resentment, Penelope as a young wanton who in middle age cherishes respectability above all things. Eventually, memory is subsumed in white noise.
Even this, though, would be not quite enough. There must have been some final discipline that destroyed the last vestiges of self, but, whatever it was, it was so thorough that I lack the capacity even to imagine it.
With relief, I open the stove and feed the book to the flames. It is the last link to who I was, and there is just enough of me left to realize it. The book writhes, blackens and disappears. Now every debt is paid, every sin is erased and I can begin anew, I who was once Odysseus and now am no one.
Passages like that fill this gem of a book and recommend it easily over the cacophony of the calculus involved.» - Steve Donoghue

"In fact," writes Zachary Mason, as if anyone could doubt him, "there have been innumerable Trojan wars." And how could he be wrong? What era has been free of stupid wars that threaten not to end, or of the stupid, stubborn kings who start them? (So much staked for handsome Helen? Come on, there must have been oil under Troy!) Little comfort to the Trojans, or to those outside the Green Zone, but wars do end eventually. Heroes and villains, should they survive, sail home. Some make it. Some don't. And some, even once home, never quite return. "And if you find her poor," quipped Constantine Cavafy, cruelly, "Ithaca has not defrauded you."
Wars. Journeys. Monsters. Storms. An angry god. A visit with the dead. A faithful or unfaithful spouse. A destination that recedes, apparently infinitely, the closer you get. The Odyssey provides fodder for a story or two, some high-minded metaphoric play, a nest of cliches if things go awry. "Inevitably," Mason continues, "each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors." So Virgil reads Homer, pilfers what he can and lets Aeneas, a Trojan, found Rome. Ovid picks up Homer's pen and hands it to Penelope. (The first of his Heroides is a letter from Odysseus/Ulysses' wife to her tardy mate: "You were careful, I'm sure, to always think first of me.") Lucian sends Ulysses to the moon. Dante grants him a glimpse of purgatory, then drops him in hell.
Eventually, Homer - and Odysseus - would become something like a beginning, the myth at the origin of the West's many myths. "I am become a name," Tennyson wrote of the questing hero, whose archetype he helped cement. James Joyce, from what I understand, also got involved.
Joyce casts a long shadow, but Odysseus' wanderings did not stop with Ulysses. He left a trail of salt and sand across Ezra Pound's Cantos. Louis Aragon abducted Odysseus' son, tender Telemachus, subjecting him to a novella of Dada high jinks. Unfazed, Odysseus climbed in bed with the poet Cavafy, with Nikos Kazantzakis, with Robert Graves. Derek Walcott reimagined him in the Caribbean. Pop has not neglected him: See the Coen brothers, Sting, "The Simpsons."» - Ben Ehrenreich

"The hero of Homer’s Odyssey is a modern man in ancient times, an eloquent outfoxer whose life is one long, furious act of self-invention. The embodiment of metis, or “cunning intelligence,” Odysseus adopts false identities fluidly and fully, invites a god’s wrath rather than let an act of cleverness go unknown, risks death to hear the ruinous songs of the Sirens because he cannot bear to let the opportunity pass.
The story of his 10-year journey home employs a narrative structure as complex as its protagonist and has inspired versions by writers as disparate as James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, and Joel and Ethan Coen. Now, into the tradition steps Zachary Mason with The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
Mason’s conceit, explained in a brief preface, is that his novel is a translation of a pre-Homeric papyrus comprising “44 concise variations on Odysseus’ story that omit stock epic formulae in favor of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity.”
It is true that more has been written and lost about the exploits of Odysseus than has been preserved, and Mason is on to something in suggesting that the Homeric version makes canonical what was once “formless, fluid, its elements shuffled into new narratives like cards in a deck.” The Lost Books of the Odyssey, though, would more plausibly have been excavated from the files of Jorge Luis Borges or the early drafts of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities than from Mason’s proposed “rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus.”
The first “lost” book, “A Sad Revelation,” begins at one of the story’s pivotal junctures, the hero’s return to Ithaca. In the Homeric version, Odysseus’ house is overrun by suitors demanding that his wife choose a new king from among them, and the hero approaches cautiously, full of strategy and subterfuge.
Here, he picks up his sword, walks home and finds a man, “soft, gray and heavy,” dozing before a fire. Penelope has followed convention and remarried. It is the least dramatic of all possible returns, and Mason captures the horror of this banal defeat. Odysseus reflects on the countless tableaus he has imagined in place of this one — a kind of Odysseus-as-Mason moment — then realizes that “what he sees before him is a vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god.” He flees gleefully, a vista of endless possibility opening before hero and reader both.
In “Guest Friend,” the ruse by which Odysseus dodges assassination is less interesting than the Borgesian construct at the story’s heart: “that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else.” Silence is a mercy, granting quiet death to a distant stranger, and the mysteries of life might unravel if one could find one’s teller.
“Agamemnon and the Word” is similarly cerebral; the leader of the Greek army commands his wisest counselors to write a book explaining the world. Over several lifetimes, the king insists on ever greater brevity, until at last he predictably orders a single word, which Odysseus delivers.
The power of language and the magic of storytelling are never far from Mason’s mind. He delights particularly, and perhaps excessively, in inventing creation stories about the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” In one chapter, they are scripts written by the gods and double as symbols of war’s folly: “There have been innumerable Trojan wars... each representing a fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the authorial intent.” In another, the books are chess manuals taken to an extreme of abstraction.
A pair of rather listless tales credit Odys­seus himself. In “Fragment,” he is a habitual sower of lies, one of which is set down as the “Odyssey,” and in “The Iliad of Odysseus,” a cowardly and cruel iteration of the protagonist — Odysseus as the Trojans of Virgil’s “Aeneid” saw him — becomes a bard and distorts his minor misdeeds into heroic fare.
Mason’s prose is finely wrought, but his chapters sometimes read like intellectual exercises masquerading as stories. It is when the emphasis shifts to exploring character and theme, and The Lost Books of the Odyssey engages more substantively with its source material, that the novel achieves real emotional resonance. In the haunting “Epiphany,” Poseidon’s wrath becomes a cover story for Odysseus’ troubles. In truth, the affection of Odysseus’ protectress, the goddess Athena, has reached its logical conclusion: she offers herself to him, with immortality thrown into the bargain.
Odysseus, feeling like “a child watching his father, incorruptible and immovable, beyond all weak human passion, dissolve into tears,” rejects her and is forsaken: “I do not think she persecuted me — that would be beneath her — but I have felt her absence. . . . And I was reckless, after she left me, and I paid.”
The final chapter, “Last Islands,” is another success. An aged and restless Odysseus, not unlike the protagonist of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” decides to retrace his path to Troy. The sites of his former glory are diminished, overgrown, and he accepts it with equanimity. Troy has become a tourist attraction, replete with actors costumed as heroes. There Odysseus finds peace, mediated by Athena and an ambiguous blend of feebleness and self-deception.
Mason’s episodes are scattershot, as unearthed fragments tend to be, and yet there is a pleasingly programmatic under­current to the variations he plays, as if he has devised an algorithm to chart the infinite arrangements of his narrative elements, then selected a few to render. His approach embraces all of Greek mythology, and the nuance and ingenuity of his riffs and remixes confirm his command of the material. He speaks as Achilles, the Cyclops Polyphemus and the loyal swineherd Eumaios; recasts the story of Persephone and Hades with Helen and Paris in the lead roles; makes Theseus a time-traveler; sends Achilles on a mission to conquer a decidedly un-Greek heaven.
Mason’s repertory of Odysseuses is extensive — they are comic, dead, doubled, ghosts, amnesiacs — but when the need arises, he provides an exquisite Homeric version, dripping with metis. “I will make your friend there as alive as you are,” the hero, referring to a dead Patroclus, assures a “clay simulacrum” of Achilles in “The Myrmidon Golem,” a mash-up of Greek mythology and Jewish folklore. Then, true to his word, he kills the golem. An equally wily, voice-throwing Odysseus fools the Fates into giving him better than he deserves in “One Kindness.” Such moments center the reader, fortify his reserves for the journeys to come.
Some are rocky indeed. At times, Mason’s conceits go nowhere, and don’t get there fast enough. The results are chapters missing the sense of purpose and play that animate the book’s best efforts, chapters shrugged off the moment they end. The Lost Books of the Odyssey calls itself a novel, but Mason’s approach is decidedly that of a short story writer, and he often hangs everything on a chapter’s final lines — searing it closed with flashy twists more clever than satisfying, or cinching it together with tidy bows.
Even when he falters, though, Mason’s imagination soars and his language delights. He is a writer much like his protagonist: prone to crash landings, but resourceful and eloquent enough to find his way home." - Adam Mansbach

"Physically and in its narrative structure, Zachary Mason’s first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reminds me very much of Einstein’s Dreams. Even the authors come from similar environments, Alan Lightman being a physics professor at MIT and Mason an AI computer scientist who once taught at Oxford. Both books are short, with Lightman’s at 192 pages and Mason’s at 228. And both are comprised of a series of brief chapters, dreams, or reimaginings.
In the preface, Mason lays out his framework: These pages consist of 44 papyrus variations on Odysseus’ story—the source material, if you will, for Homer’s epic poem. These 44 chapters then, are the “lost books.”
Who is Odysseus? Warrior, sailor, wanderer, canny politician? And by extension, who are we? Are we merely characters in a story as told by someone else? Or are we the inventors of our own lives? Mason asks these questions in various creative ways, including a “Fragment,” all that survives, of the 45th book. Odysseus molded his own reputation, taking what preceded him and fashioning it to his own will. One of his “lies” became Homer’s Odyssey.
In “A Sad Revelation,” after having been gone 20 years Odysseus returns to Ithaca to find his wife, Penelope, remarried—to an old man. Realizing that Penelope herself is much older, he blanches at the thought that he is as well. Refusing to accept this, he flees, feeling that the gods are playing tricks. Homer’s version, on the other hand, has Penelope surrounded by suitors looking to displace Odysseus as Ithaca’s king.
In The Other Assassin Agamemnon, distrustful of the acclaim that Odysseus has garnered, signs his death warrant. Ironically, the man assigned to carry out the task—no one has looked at the name of the condemned person on the document—is Odysseus himself. He reports to the court that the assassination of Odysseus has been carried out. He also reports that Odysseus, before his death, swore to slay the man who ordered his execution.
These first two “lost books” are narrated in the third person, but “The Stranger,” the third, switches to first person. Or first double-person: Odysseus, on the shores of Troy, is visited by an alternate version of himself, who tells him
What now?… I see that my life is occupied. I made no plans for this. I cannot imagine a plan. In effect, I am exiled from my life. I wish I had not come.
This is some self-pity on Odysseus’ part. But is it self-pity if the self doing the pitying is your alternate self? His other self takes leave, and Odysseus doesn’t meet him again until his return to Ithaca. The man sits on his throne with his Queen, Penelope, and tells the returning Odysseus that “of the two of us I think that you, freed from necessity, are the happier.” Such are some of the dizzying reimaginings of Mason’s book. Mason gives us several stories of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca—each one different from the last, and most in Odysseus’ own words. There are a few stories told by other players (Achilles’ “Victory Lament” for example), but the authorial voice and Odysseus’ point of view are most prominent.
“The Fugitive” is an extraordinary commentary not only on free will, but on history itself. In it, Odysseus finds a book called The Iliad which tells the story of “his” war. He reads that the book was written by the gods before the wars, and is not history at all but “divine archetypes.”
… there have been innumerable Trojan wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic, each representing a fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the authorial intent. Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.
Following this is a sly aside to the effect that sometimes, and by mistake, both The Iliad and The Odyssey have fallen into the hands of some of the players—Agamemnon, Achilles, Priam. It made no difference in their actions, it seems.
“Helen’s Image” is one of the more imaginative retellings. Like many, it turns what we know from Homer on its head. Here, Helen escapes Agamemnon with Odysseus, and Paris absconds with Penelope, all the while thinking she is Helen.
“The Book Of Winter” takes on the temperature and feel of its title. It’s lyrically told by Odysseus, who finds himself in a cabin in the woods, surrounded by
the susurrus of falling snow, the tracks of deer and hare encircling the house, the black rooks landing heavily on laden branches and sending down white showers.He’s not unhappy and “despite the monotony” is “never bored.” But who has built this place and stocked it with food? Who is he, in fact, as he doesn’t even know his own name? He has the slash on his thigh that all versions of Odysseus have, so at least we know. Searching the cabin yet again, he finds a book behind the wood pile and reads it straight through—it’s the story of Odysseus—but doesn’t recognize himself, wondering “what the book was meant to tell” him. He finds it full of allegorical possibilities, and even entertains the idea that the story could in some small way be his own. But is he the cyclops? Telemachus? Penelope? He rereads the book and is shocked at the revelation that he is in fact, Odysseus. Or, more accurately, that he has ceased to be Odysseus in order to escape the wrath of Poseidon. By forgetting himself, he has ceased to be himself. The logical conclusion is to do away with the final traces of identity.
With relief, I open the stove and feed the book to the flames. It is the last link to who I was, and there is just enough left to see it. The book blackens, writhes and disappears. Now every debt is paid, every sin erased and I can begin anew. I who was once Odysseus and now am no one.
This is a book that I’ve grown to appreciate more upon reflection—and that’s rarely the case for me. Take “Record of a Game,” for example, which I glossed over at first. Revisited, the chapter gives the reader a brief history of the nature of the game of chess and descriptions of the pieces, and here Mason yields up yet another parable for the origin of Homer’s books. The game of chess originated in India and migrated to Achaean society. By the eighth century B.C., a certain game primer had taken on essentially literary characteristics.
This book came to be known as The Iliad and contained what appeared to be meaningless lists of names which bore a striking resemblance to Book Two of Homer’s classic and its Catalog of Ships (which “can be usefully read as a treatise on positional play in the opening [of a chess game]”). Another manual of Achaean chess, called The Odyssey (“most likely apocryphal”), is the record of “a long and bitter endgame.”
It has been speculated that the Odyssey is a sort of fantastic parody of a chess book, a treatise on the tactics to be used after the game has ended and the board been abandoned by the players, the pieces left finally to their own devices and to entropy . One of the few surviving pieces is Odysseus, inching across the crumbling board toward the home square.
And here’s Odysseus, abandoned by his god:
I often wondered what had happened to Pallas Athena. Her absence grieved me and I was no longer sure I had not imagined her. It is unlikely she was an illusion, I told myself. Most of the details of my travels have become vague but I will never forget the clarity of mind she brought me, like a lucid, sunlit dream.Mason gives us several alternate looks at the cast peopling Homer’s books. What he doesn’t do, though, is tinker with the great themes: predestination or free will, the nature of identity and sense of self. And he updates the epic stories with some new concerns for our age, the nature of art and of history-telling. The Lost Books of the Odyssey was originally published by a small press, Starcherone Books, in a very limited edition. At the time, the author commissioned the horse at right to accompany mailings to major literary reviewers. How’s that for creativity?
As for the future, Mason may retell Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and could well move into Richard Powers territory with a planned book on artificial intelligence as pomo-lit. I look forward to more from him." - Charlie Wendell

" 'I have never been at a loss for a tale, lie, or synonym,' says the hero of Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, who shares this much at least with Homer's Odysseus.
Mason's Odysseus shares many of the same adventures, as well. He battles with the Greeks at Troy, endures a long journey home in which he meets "the cannibal Cyclops, the lotus eaters, the sirens, Circe, and inexorable Scylla," and in the end he's reunited with his wife, Penelope.
But in Mason's inventive first novel, it may be that Odysseus is married to Helen instead, or returns to find that Penelope hasn't waited faithfully, or has killed herself on the prophecy that Odysseus would never return.
"No man will return to you, but not for a long while," she's told at Delphi, right after Odysseus, captive in the cave of the Cyclops, has given his name as No Man.
It doesn't matter if you've read The Odyssey 30 years ago or never. The familiar story points are all highlighted here, or are filled in by Mason over the course of the narrative. And part of the fun is losing track of what is authentic Odyssey, and what he's making up, in the footnotes especially.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a collection of separate stories, single episodes, variations on elements of the classical epic, which, we're reminded, was itself an assembly of scattered fables and bardic variations.
In Book 18, "The Iliad of Odysseus," in which Troy overruns and slaughters the Greeks, Odysseus flees to become a wandering bard: "I took to telling the story of Odysseus of the Greeks, cleverest of men, whose ruses had been the death of so many. ... It was when I was a guest in Tyre that I first heard another bard singing one of my songs and it occurred to me that I had in my hands the means of making myself an epic hero."
Mason's brief bio says he is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, and he follows in the small-chapters tradition of such ingenious scientist-first novelists as Alan Lightman in Einstein's Dreams (medicine, physics) and Alessandro Boffa in You're an Animal, Viskovitz (biology). Like any novel without a running narrative, Mason's book has its strong and its not-so-strong chapters, its disappointing third quarter. But it is often wondrous, illuminating, and so expertly told it brings you back to the spell of the original.
In one breathtaking chapter, Death, going by the name of Paris, steals Helen, and an enraged Menelaus insists the Greeks follow after.
"Soon the dark hulls ground on the sands of Ilium, Death's country... The sand crackled underfoot – Odysseus scooped up a handful and saw that it was made up of ground bone, tiny fragments of tooth, skull and vertebrae... The augurs stared forlornly at the birdless sky."
The Lost Books of the Odyssey is an impressive fictional debut, and Zachary Mason is definitely a writer to watch." - David Walton