Mason Reinvents Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ in ‘The Lost Books’

Despite its length, its poetic turns and its monumental status, “The Odyssey” follows a simple premise: man departs, man gets lost, man arrives safe and sound at destination.

“The Lost Books of the Odyssey,” Zachary Mason’s mesmerizing new novel, takes Odysseus’s homeward bound journey and riddles it with uncertainty. Ithaca could be the hero’s home or it could be an illusion. Odysseus himself may be the author of his own story; his heroic deeds could be merely his own invention. There’s no one end, no one story. Mason’s tale doesn’t just wander—it writhes.

Mason’s task is a bold one. After all, few read Homer’s “Odyssey” with the nagging feeling that something is missing from the story, and the epic is a touchstone for tales of travel and homecoming. As early as the first century BCE, Vergil was borrowing from the Greek epic to tell his own “Aeneid”; Leopold Bloom’s very different wandering in “Ulysses” set the bar almost impossibly high for modern adaptations. Mason’s book, then, faces its own Scylla and Charybdis—on the one hand, the menace of literary forerunners whose adaptations are now classics themselves; on the other, the possibility of merely echoing a tale already sung.

But Mason is himself a bold writer, and “The Lost Books” moves deftly and confidently out of the realm of adaptation into its own imagined ground. His sentences, brawny and lithe, add their own muscle to Homer’s verse. “When he was drunk, Achilles would take his knife and try to pierce his hand, or, if he was very drunk, his heart, and thereby were the delicate blades of many daggers broken,” he writes of the reckless hero.

Mason’s stories are brief and flavorful. In a short introduction to the book, he presents his vignettes as recently discovered fragments containing alternative versions of “The Odyssey.” One story has Odysseus (here named “Mr. O.”) living in a sanatorium, where he spends his days trying to remember a distant war. Another has him as Agamemnon’s prized assassin, faced with the unfortunate order of killing himself. Sticking with the pretext of fragmentation, Mason never fully fleshes out the action in each tale. As a result, his stories elude simple interpretation.

At times, Mason takes up the epic’s loose ends, giving voice to Homer’s minor characters. The Cyclops, who in Homer’s tale finds himself blinded and beguiled by Odysseus’s wit, tells his own account of the hero’s visit here. As he traces his loss of sight, the Cyclops sheds light on the duplicity of appearance. He says of his offender, “He had not uttered a single true word, of course, but we are all revealed in our lies.”

But mostly the book circles around the craft of truth itself. Mason is a computer scientist by training, and codes and mazes pattern his stories. In one tale, Theseus, famed conqueror of the Minotaur, slays the beast only to wander forever in a labyrinth. In another, sirens seduce Odysseus not through their beautiful tunes, but through the promise of wisdom. “As their songs crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that... behind everything... was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack,” the wily-eyed hero recalls. As Odysseus searches for a definite solution, so too does the reader constantly comb the pages for a nugget of fact.

Critics have aptly compared Mason to the experimental novelist Italo Calvino; the looping path of “The Lost Books of The Odyssey” calls to mind the continual beginnings of Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” and the distorted views of Venice in “Invisible Cities” find their match in Mason’s ever-refracted portrait of Odysseus. Both authors leave the reader with the task of sorting through their sketches. Like Calvino, Mason trades in shadows.

Also like Calvino, Mason prefers puzzles to set truths. For that reason, his novel goes beyond a simple adaptation of a classic text. In his essay “Why Read the Classics?” Calvino once wrote, “A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much a sense of discovery as the first reading.” Mason’s reimagining takes such discovery to heart. He himself may be aware of the similarities between his and the Italian author’s work. Many of his plot twists recall Calvino’s own piece, “The Odysseys Within ‘The Odyssey,’” which opens by wondering, “How many Odysseys does ‘The Odyssey’ contain?” Mason’s shifting variations seem to ask the same question.

By exploring the source material’s hidden uncertainties, and exploiting their destabilizing potential, Mason both enlivens and enriches the original text. As a collection of stories, “The Lost Books of the Odyssey,” is an entertaining and enthralling read. Placed in dialogue with Homer’s original, it is a nimbly crafted testament to the power of storytelling.

—Staff writer Madeleine M. Schwartz can be reached at mschwart@fas.harvard.edu.