Noted: The wanderer returns, brilliantly arrayed.

Room with a view of Sandycove.

By SIMON GOLDHILL [The Times Literary Supplement] – Since James Joyce’s Ulysses made rewriting The Odyssey the foundational gesture of modernism, there have been innumerable rather trivial contemporary engagements with Homer, which, even when they are as engaging as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, have rarely been more than a one-trick pony. Derek Walcott’s Omeros, in verse, is the outstanding exception. The thought of yet another slim, self-conscious volume of modernist prose, this time a first novel by a Californian computer scientist, whose PhD was on a “computational corpus-based metaphor extraction system”, does not sound promising – although the idea of a system to extract metaphors from texts might be a good modernist joke: a terrifying totalitarian world where metaphor-cleansing was an industrialized process.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey certainly proclaims its modernist status. It has forty-four very short chapters – the longest is only nine generously laid out pages, the shortest a bare single page – each of which is a fragmentary narrative, a calque on the Odyssey. Each is on the impossibility of homecoming, a theme that the Odyssey itself constructs by having Odysseus announce his imminent re-departure as soon as he gets back into bed with his wife, Penelope, after twenty years’ absence; and each is also on the power and lures of storytelling itself – again a theme the Odyssey made its own, not least as Odysseus tells his own story again and again, including that first night back in bed with Penelope. The impossibility of true homecoming and an obsession with language’s work are the archetypal tropes of alienated modernism, as is the delight in the oblique fragment.

Continued at the TLS | More Chronicle & Notices.

This Fortnightly Review article is filed under the following rubrics: Chronicle & Notices.
Publication: Wednesday, 16 June 2010, at 12:12.
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Noted: The wanderer returns, brilliantly arrayed.

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