 | The Lost Books of the Odyssey is billed as a novel, but reads like a collection of short stories, vignettes, and fragments. Inspired by the ancient Greek epic attributed to Homer, the stories in this collection expand, diverge from, and provide a fresh viewpoint on the original story of Odysseus's journey home. For example, in “Penelope’s Legacy” the hero Odysseus comes home to discover his wife Penelope has died (unlike the original where she fends off suitors for twenty years, dutifully waiting for him). “He mastered his desire to seize her legs and kiss her thighs and hands for he knew she would turn to ash and shadow as soon as he touched her and moreover nothing is more disgraceful than to acknowledge the presence of the dead.” |
According to the book’s preface, the novel’s stories represent a “translation” of alternate versions of the tales, which "survive in Hellenistic friezes, on Cycladic funerary urns, and in a pre-Ptolemaic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus.”
 | In “A Sad Tale” Odysseus returns home to Penelope and “notices how she has aged—her hips wider, her hair more gray than not, the skin around her eyes traced with fine wrinkles.” He’s appalled that she’s married another. “He spent the days of his exile imagining different homecoming scenarios but it never occurred to him that she would just give up.” The Odysseus of this tale decides middle-aged Penelope is a “vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god.” |
The book explores the power of myth and story. In “Guest Friend” Odysseus receives hospitality from a king who seeks the story-teller whom he believes creates his life with his tales. The two men walk in an orchard exchanging stories, and it becomes clear the king is testing Odysseus.
Cunning Odysseus weaves this tale: “Archers lie in wait for the pair with orders to kill their king’s companion—if he was the teller, he would not die in his own story and would thereby be revealed. And if he was just a man, well, no one need know that a nameless graybeard far from home died by treachery.”
Odysseus slyly changes sides with the king in the twilight and the archers kill him instead of Odysseus. The story closes with these lines: “I am leaving the orchard alone as night swallows the last of the sun and I tell this story to myself very quietly.”
Cunning Odysseus weaves this tale: “Archers lie in wait for the pair with orders to kill their king’s companion—if he was the teller, he would not die in his own story and would thereby be revealed. And if he was just a man, well, no one need know that a nameless graybeard far from home died by treachery.”
Odysseus slyly changes sides with the king in the twilight and the archers kill him instead of Odysseus. The story closes with these lines: “I am leaving the orchard alone as night swallows the last of the sun and I tell this story to myself very quietly.”
 | Another favorite, “A Night in the Woods,” finds Odysseus in Ithaca disguised as a peddler. “Penelope is more than an ordinary woman,” he says, “but many outrages can happen in twenty years.” “On my throne Penelope lounged, taller than I remember, her presence filling the room. Young gentlemen orbit around her with vacant faces and deferential postures, lighting up when she notices them.” The “peddler” warns Penelope that Odysseus will arrive tomorrow. He remembers his wedding night: “I saw a flash of green eyes. Something moved behind me and I ducked as she sprang at me, the fur on her flank brushing my shoulder.” Lupine Penelope later returns “as a woman again.” |
The next day, Odysseus “arrives” in Ithaca Town. The maids are cleaning up an apparent slaughter, no suitors in sight. Penelope greets him and Odysseus says he is “happy to be back with her, though of course I would not tolerate the slightest insubordination, let alone infidelity.”
Convenient that he forewarned her of his arrival in peddler-guise.
Convenient that he forewarned her of his arrival in peddler-guise.
The many plot twists of these reimagined stories are great fun.
- What if King Agamemnon hires an assassin to kill wily Odysseus, and the hired assassin is . . . Odysseus. In another story, they fashion a clay golem to take the place of Achilles. Yet another "what if" alternative: Odysseus and his men marry women of an island, have children, “and thought less and less and finally never of their wives in Ithaca.”
- What if Odysseus, cursed by the gods, decides to go far away and live alone until his memory of who he was fades, and with it the gods’ curses, so that he becomes nobody?
- What if the goddess Athena grants Odysseus one request and he asks “to spend eternity making his way home from a war indefinitely far in the past to an island indefinitely far in the future. He would remember that the war had been painful, but that he had won it.”
- What if Cassandra learns the future while hiding in the god Apollo’s temple, but he doesn’t punish her. “He said, ‘Never mind. No one will ever believe you’.”
- What if when Odysseus finally arrives home and enters his house: “Within, nothing. Moss on the dung-heap and disintegrating potsherds. A dog’s verdigrised brass collar clanked underfoot. The house was cold and still. As he crept down a corridor, he looked back, saw his footprints in the dust and desiccated leaves.”
- What if while Odysseus bemoans a lack of ships on the horizon that would free him from his island prison, the god Hermes watches, frustrated. “The sharp axe winked in the grass where [Hermes] had put it weeks ago, the blade carefully turned to catch the evening sun. Behind it was a stand of straight, tall young pines, perfect for ship-building.”
- What if Odysseus tricks Achilles and locks him in a tomb for three days, hoping to drive him mad, but when he opens the door: “Within the tomb Achilles sat with his eyes closed, concentrating on each slow, shuddering breath.” The now enlightened Achilles then leaves the war, “having concluded that he should alleviate suffering rather than cause it.”
Odysseus satisfies his curiosity in “Sirens,” binding himself to the mast “while the crew stuffed their ears with beeswax. It seemed odd no one had thought of it before but in general there is no accounting for the bovine stupidity of mankind.”
 | While listening to the sirens sing, Odysseus’s life flashes before him. In his fight with a Trojan during the war: “the man’s surprise as I attacked him blind-side, how easy it was to slip my point past his guard and run him through, the Trojan’s dawning rage at the affront to his body, an emotion half formed on his face when death found him, the tug on my blade as his body fell away.” … “Finally, I saw myself, how my wit exceeded that of other men but gave me no leverage against fate, and how in time it would avail me nothing but possibly an understanding of the full scope of my helplessness.” |
In the “Iliad of Odysseus” we get a fresh take on our hero: “I have often wondered whether all men are cowards like I am. [If tales of] hard-muscled men who do not know what fear is—all a fraud, a conceit for bards and braggarts that has nothing to do with the vapid squalor of war.”
 | “The exception to my general military ineptitude was with the bow, at which I excelled. When I pulled the strong the world became quiet and I was aware only of the target ... Unfortunately for me this only exacerbated my reputation for effeminacy—as the bow allows one to strike from safety, the bow is a coward’s weapon, the sort of thing used by nomads and Asiatics. I could shoot rooks in the eye at a hundred paces all I liked and still be despised.” He is also a born storyteller, another skill considered beneath landed men. He goes AWOL during the siege of Troy and becomes an itinerant bard. Later he hears bards reciting songs he created and realizes “I had in my hands the means of making myself an epic hero.” When he finally sails home, he composes stories enroute: “From a muscle-bound Scythian brigand who had caught me stealing cheeses from his cave I made a one-eyed cannibal ogre. From cold winters on Chios when I spoke to no one but my lover I made island imprisonments with kindly witches.” |
The language in the book often delights.
- “They left Ithaca on a mirror-clear night, the ships sweeping through black water and reflected stars.”
- “In the end did his clean white bones float slowly down to settle on the abyssal plain, or did he marry her and become prince of the seals, living in the deep and forgetting his life as a man, or did he drag himself through the surf onto what his heart knew at once for the bright lands?”
- “There are many things to love about this place—the susurrus of falling snow, the tracks of deer and hare encircling the house, the black rooks landing heavily on laden branches and sending down white showers. And at night the wolves prowl my doorstep, their fur crusted with snow, hungry winter revenants howling their hopeless lament.”
- “The sun would bore into my brain over the hours and drive out everything except a ringing brightness, making everything look hollow or flat.”
- “Distant lights from coastal towns glittered like myriads of tiny luminous creatures drawn up out of the deep by a rare current.”
- About the monster Scylla: “The power of a god and the intelligence of a wasp.”
- Coming ashore in Death’s country: “The sand crackled underfoot—Odysseus scooped up a handful and saw that it was made up of ground bone, tiny fragments of tooth, skull, and vertebrae.”
- Describing Athena: “her skin was very hot and she smelled like metal and summer.”
In the final story, an aging Odysseus longs to relive his glory days and misses Athena: “Most of the details of my travels have become vague but I will never forget the clarity of mind she brought me, like a lucid, sunlit dream.”
He and his old companions retrace their long journey home and find the world much changed. The runes of Troy have become a tourist attraction with reenactments and cheap souvenirs. As he’s leaving he finds in the dunes “the very shield forged for Achilles by the divine smith Hephaistos.” Rather than take it home to gather dust on his wall, he tosses it in the sea, then “went back to my ship with a light heart.”
The point of view switched to Athena, watching him, and grateful that his eyes “were not as sharp as they had been [for] he had not noticed that the workmanship of the shield was crude, the figures awkward, that there had been countless other shields just like it for sale cheap among the stalls in Troy’s ruins.”
He and his old companions retrace their long journey home and find the world much changed. The runes of Troy have become a tourist attraction with reenactments and cheap souvenirs. As he’s leaving he finds in the dunes “the very shield forged for Achilles by the divine smith Hephaistos.” Rather than take it home to gather dust on his wall, he tosses it in the sea, then “went back to my ship with a light heart.”
The point of view switched to Athena, watching him, and grateful that his eyes “were not as sharp as they had been [for] he had not noticed that the workmanship of the shield was crude, the figures awkward, that there had been countless other shields just like it for sale cheap among the stalls in Troy’s ruins.”
I’m not sure this collection would be as enjoyable if I wasn't already familiar with the original Odyssey story. A handful of stories in The Lost Books of the Odyssey are set in the modern world or involve time loops and other science fiction tropes, which I didn't care for—but most mimic the tone of the original Odyssey with alternative plots or points of view. Recommended for Greek mythology fans.
Read an immersive version of the Odyssey from Penelope’s point of view: Ithaca.
Read other mythic fiction: Babylonia, Shit Cassandra Saw, Spear, Song of the Huntress,
The Witch’s Heart, The Queen’s of Innis Lear, Fevered Star, Mythic Journeys
Read more about Greek myth: Medusa, Sirens Empowered, Aphrodite, #MeTooMedusa, Justice,
The Spring Maiden, 15 Healing Deities & Practices
Read other mythic fiction: Babylonia, Shit Cassandra Saw, Spear, Song of the Huntress,
The Witch’s Heart, The Queen’s of Innis Lear, Fevered Star, Mythic Journeys
Read more about Greek myth: Medusa, Sirens Empowered, Aphrodite, #MeTooMedusa, Justice,
The Spring Maiden, 15 Healing Deities & Practices
