If You’re Seeing ‘The Odyssey,’ First Read ‘An Odyssey’

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is this summer’s hot new movie. Nolan’s epic has gained both praise and criticism, the latter coming as a result of the movie’s DEI casting. Black actress Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy. “Transgender man” Elliot Page has a minor role.

There will be a full review of The Odyssey in a forthcoming issue of Chronicles. Until then I’d like to urge those interested in the film to read An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, a 2017 memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn. Of course, you can also read Homer’s The Odyssey itself. Yet if you are looking for a brilliant exploration of the ancient poem, An Odyssey can’t be topped. 

A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, Mendelsohn is a classics scholar who teaches a seminar on The Odyssey at Bard College. An Odyssey is part literary exegesis, part memoir, and part psychological study about how Homer’s epic brought Mendelsohn and his father to common ground after years of emotional distance. Mendelsohn’s father, Jay, a retired mathematician and research scientist from New York, had been interested in the classics during his school days but spent his career in the hard sciences. After retiring, he asks to study The Odyssey in his son’s class at Bard. 

At first, Daniel is unsure, and even a little embarrassed, by his father’s interest. One of the things that had separated them until that time was that Daniel was more into the arts than mathematics and science. Jay drew a difference between “soft” and “hard” ways of learning. The lyrics of pop music we were “soft,” for example. He would say, “a rhyme is a rhyme, you can’t approximate!” For Jay,

the more difficult something was to achieve or to appreciate, the more unpleasant to do or to understand, the more likely it was to possess this quality that for him was the hallmark of worthiness. X is x. His sense that there is a deep and inscrutable essence to things, an irreducible hardness that he had intuited but which many if not most other people had failed to discern, informed his dealings with people, too.