ODYSSEE

Les épreuves sont arrivées ce matin au courrier – et je peux déjà vous annoncer (une centaine de pages plus tard), le petit chef-d’œuvre. On revient dessus très vite !

With brilliant prose, a rich body of authorial knowledge, and a terrific imagination, Zachary Mason has fashioned a book that might have been one of the classics of world literature, if only it actually dated from the time of Homer. 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. Constructed by an author who is part poet and part computer genius, The Lost Books of the Odyssey employs theories of artificial intelligence and the creation of fractals in its composition, traces of which are effaced by the sheer beauty of the language and scope of its accomplishment. This postmodern novel is by no means simple game-playing, but an elegantly written, frequently beautiful book, 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 that is destined to become a classic in its own right.


"“Zachary Mason’s astounding glosses of The Odysey 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