The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason
reviewed by James Crossley

Starcherone Books, 2007. 228 pp. Paper: $16.00.

It’s a bold author who attempts to re-imagine Homer, and a brave translator who allows the possibility that his source text may be “essentially meaningless.” Zachary Mason purports to be one or the other, or perhaps both at once, claiming in his introduction to The Lost Books of the Odyssey that the work is a decryption of an ancient document comprising fragmentary and contradictory outtakes from the legend of Odysseus, a document so fiendishly encoded and tersely written that the resulting translation may be merely “the product of over-interpretation and of chance.” In fact, this not-quite plausible introduction is the first of almost fifty note-perfect short fictions, literary origin myths in the tradition of Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial. The fabular pieces here ring changes on the events and characters of the classical period—Polyphemus recounts his version of his blinding, aged warriors return to a Troy that’s become a tourist trap, an omnipotent Achilles overthrows the gods, and Theseus’s own home becomes a labyrinth. In one tale, the hero is aghast to find after all his journeying that his wife has given him up for a new husband, but “then, mercifully, revelation comes. He realizes that this is not Penelope. . . . This is not Ithaca—what he sees before him is a vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god. The real Ithaca is elsewhere, somewhere on the sea-roads, hidden. Giddy, Odysseus turns and flees the tormenting shadows.” With one foot firmly planted in antiquity and one in the postmodern world, the book is an odd but well-balanced hybrid, the kind of work that’s usually thrown off as a lark by an established writer toying with new forms, like Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus or DeLillo’s Valparaiso. All the more impressive that a debut author could create such a compelling curio.