We end our year of discussions with a poignant memoir about journeys and the complicated and tender relationship between parents and children,
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn, a literary critic and literature professor at Bard College, uses Homer's
Odyssey in both theme and form to reflect upon his relationship with his father and to memorialize him after his death. Mendelsohn's narrative begins in the recent past, when his father, Jay, a retired research scientist, enrolls in his freshman
Odyssey seminar and then, after the semester, the two of them take an
Odyssey-themed cruise together. It also circles back in time to Mendelsohn's memories of his childhood and forward in time to his father's hospitalization after a serious fall. Like the
Odyssey, Mendelsohn's memoir is "about a son who for a long time is unrecognized by and unrecognizable to his father, until late, very late, when they join together for a great adventure" and also "about a man in the middle of his life, a man who is, we must remember, a son as well as a father, and who at the end of this story falls down and weeps because he has confronted the spectacle of his father's old age." He is both Telemachus and Odysseus, and his memoir is the story of the great gift of spending the last year of his father's life getting to know him a little better.
What do you think? What does Mendelsohn come to understand about his father Jay? Would this understanding have been possible without the experience of reading and traveling together? Contemplate your own relationship with your parents: How well did you know or understand them when you were young? How well do you think you know and understand them now? What events and experiences led you to your current understanding of your parents and family dynamics? Another theme in both the
Odyssey and Mendelsohn's
An Odyssey is the power and importance of mentorship. What role do mentors play in our lives? How is it different from that of our parents? Who has served as a mentor in your life? Have you read the
Odyssey? If so, how did Mendelsohn's critical explication and personal narrative impact your understanding of the epic? If not, do you think you will read it now? What is intriguing to you about it? How does Mendelsohn incorporate themes and techniques of the
Odyssey into his own narrative? Did you find it successful and enjoyable in all it tried to do? What, in your opinion, makes a work of literature a "classic"?
We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, December 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.
