Daniel Mendelsohn

First published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1925, Jane Ellen Harrison’s Reminiscences are the irreverent memoirs of a student who declared Victorian education “ingeniously useless,” who blazed a trail for female scholars, and who changed the way we see the ancient world. Growing up in the Yorkshire countryside, Harrison showed an early aptitude for languages: by the age of seventeen, with the help of a governess, she had learned Greek, Latin, German, and some Hebrew. (“Unfortunately, having no guide, we began with the Psalms, which are hard nuts to crack.”) She went on to become the most influential Classicist of her generation. Drawing on the insights of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud, and on archaeological research, she helped to revolutionise the study of Greek myth. “The great Mother,” she wrote, “is prior to male divinities.” Unconventional in her private life (“By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know, for all my life I fell in love”), she spent her later years with the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, thirty-seven years her junior. Harrison’s zest for life is everywhere in these pages. Sprightly, amused, and amusing, her Reminiscences form an unforgettable sketch of a woman ahead of her time.

I Tre ringer utforsker Daniel Mendelsohn de underlige koblingene mellom tilfeldighetene som preger livene våre, og den stramt komponerte sammenhengen i historiene vi forteller. I en utsøkt blanding av personlige erindringer, essayistisk kritikk og biografiske beretninger innvies vi i eksilskjebner som har brakt århundrer av overlevert innsikt i fortellerkunsten med seg på vandringen. Vi følger den jødiske filologen Erich Auerbach som flykter fra Hitlers Tyskland til Istanbul hvor han skriver mesterverket Mimesis; vi møter François Fénelon, en fransk erkebiskop fra 1600-tallet som skriver en eventyrlig fortsettelse av Odysseen; og vi søker sporene etter Homer hos den tyske forfatteren W.G. Sebald som gjenoppfinner romankunsten i sitt selvvalgte eksil i siste del av det 20. århundre. Deres fortellinger om eksil og kunstneriske kriser sammenflettes med en beretning om Mendelsohns egen kamp for å gi en egnet form til to av sine bøker - familiesagaen Forsvunnet og memoarboken En odyssé. Tre ringer viser hvordan liv henger sammen på tvers av grenser, språk og århundrer, i en tankevekkende refleksjon over forholdet mellom fortelling og historie, kunst og liv.

Painted by Agnolo Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) (Italian, 1503–1572) ca. 1550–55, the young aristocrat is Lodovico Capponi (b. 1533), a page at the Medici court. As was his custom, he wears black and white, his family's armorial colors. His right index finger partially conceals the cameo he holds, revealing only the inscription sorte (fate or fortune) — an ingenious allusion to the obscurity of fate. In the mid 1550s Lodovico fell in love with a girl whom Duke Cosimo had intended for one of his cousins. After nearly three years of opposition, Cosimo suddenly relented, but he commanded that their wedding be celebrated within twenty-four hours.

A New York Times Notable Book - Winner of the National Jewish Book Award - Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award - A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist"A gripping detective story, a stirring epic, a tale of ghosts and dark marvels, a thrilling display of scholarship, a meditation on the unfathomable mystery of good and evil, a testimony to the enduring power of the ancient archetypes that haunt one Jewish family and the greater human family, The Lost is as complex and rich with meaning and story as the past it seeks to illuminate. A beautiful book, beautifully written."--Michael ChabonIn this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic--part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work--that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust--an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him.Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

"Leder dig in i något större än ett fantastiskt äventyr"Västerbottens-Kuriren"Det här är en på flera sätt fantastisk memoar, spännande och gripande om vartannat, och lärorik för den har slarvat i sina studier av antikens litteratur."SvD"En odysséär en infallsrik, underhållande och småsorglig berättelse som gör läsaren nyfiken på människor, också på de som hon har känt i hela sitt liv och vet allt om – eller tror sig veta allt om."BTJEn odyssé är en personlig berättelse om en far och sons transformativa resa genom att läsa – och återuppleva – Homeros episka mästerverk. När åttioårige Jay Mendelsohn bestämmer sig för att anmäla sig till en kurs om Odyssén på Bard college, som hans son, författaren och antikvetaren Daniel Mendelsohn håller, blir det början på ett hisnande intellektuellt och känslomässigt äventyr.För Jay, en pensionerad forskare som ser världen genom en matematikers oförlåtande ögon, är kursen en möjlighet att möta den fantastiska litteratur han inte fick chansen att utforska i sin ungdom – och en sista chans att bättre lära känna sin son. De två männen utforskar motvilligt Homeros värld tillsammans – först i klassrummet, där Jay är en besvärlig student som gång på gång utmanar sin sons tolkningar – och senare på en resa i den grekiska övärlden. Begravda familjehemligheter kommer snart upp till ytan, och det blir tydligt att Daniel har mycket lära sig av sin far också.Mitt ute på Medelhavet, på den strapatsfyllda kryssningen i Homeros spår, kommer Mendelsohns berättelse att återspegla själva Odyssén, med dess tidlösa teman av bedrägeri och erkännande, äktenskap och barn, och betydelsen av ett hem. Översättning: Matilda Södergran

A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers--Erich Auerbach, Fran ois F nelon, and W. G. Sebald--and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis. In a genre-defying book hailed as "exquisite" (The New York Times) and "spectacular" (The Times Literary Supplement), the best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own--works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; Fran ois F nelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus--a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years--resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W.G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggle to write two of his own books--a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father--that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year. ‘Astounding’ Sebastian Barry ‘A masterpiece’ Ayad Akhtar ‘This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise’Jonathan Lethem In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus – a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years – resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

I Tre ringer utforsker Daniel Mendelsohn de underlige koblingene mellom tilfeldighetene som preger livene våre, og den stramt komponerte sammenhengen i historiene vi forteller. I en utsøkt blanding av personlige erindringer, essayistisk kritikk og biografiske beretninger innvies vi i eksilskjebner som har brakt århundrer av overlevert innsikt i fortellerkunsten med seg på vandringen. Vi følger den jødiske filologen Erich Auerbach som flykter fra Hitlers Tyskland til Istanbul hvor han skriver mesterverket Mimesis; vi møter François Fénelon, en fransk erkebiskop fra 1600-tallet som skriver en eventyrlig fortsettelse av Odysseen; og vi søker sporene etter Homer hos den tyske forfatteren W.G. Sebald som gjenoppfinner romankunsten i sitt selvvalgte eksil i siste del av det 20. århundre. Deres fortellinger om eksil og kunstneriske kriser sammenflettes med en beretning om Mendelsohns egen kamp for å gi en egnet form til to av sine bøker - familiesagaen Forsvunnet og memoarboken En odyssé. Tre ringer viser hvordan liv henger sammen på tvers av grenser, språk og århundrer, i en tankevekkende refleksjon over forholdet mellom fortelling og historie, kunst og liv. Vinner av Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger 2020

From 1839 when it was invented, photography has served to create portraits of individuals, and soon thereafter portraits of families, later placed in photo albums. Photography, collected and archived, entered the intimate sphere, enabling people to arrange the fragmented images of their lives as they saw fit. Following its forerunners (miniature portraits, silhouettes, physionotraces), the photographic portrait also served the new expectations of the emerging urban bourgeoisie and its need for social representation. Studios opened up in cities everywhere to meet the fast growing demand. In addition, the new medium distinguishted itself with its esthetic superiority. "Even as it emerged, although the technique was still very primitive, photography enjoyed an exceptional quality of artistic finish (Gisèle Freund)". What can photography show us to day of the visible and invisible aspects of family sociology? "How do the roles we expect them to play betray the emotional realities and complexities of lived life?" wonders Daniel Mendelsohn, in his introduction entitled "Unknown Faces/ Redeeming Structures". By creating this corpus of fixed black and white images, each composed in a large 5'x7' frame, the photographer has produced a work of anthropological scope, reaching beyond representation by placing the subject at palpable distance, thereby objectifying it. What should we think of these seemingly impassive faces and their hypnotic gazes, what should we think of these postures, seated or standing? What goes on within these families and outside the frame? The use of a rigid protocol similar in all sessions makes every family portraits intriguing, and encourages our reflection. Inspired by the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose esthetics of objectivity tended towards minimalism, Isabelle Boccon-Gibod, a self-made artist, with an interest for technique, has played with a frontality quite similar to that of the Bechers, resting on the idea that our bodies, when joined together, form a sort of architecture. The idea, also, that a face, deprived of its smile, offers a neutrality of expression worth considering: masks fall and reveal a nakedness (naked truth?) to be admired and deciphered beyond the appearances of social games. She was guided, yet not limited, by this principle: the image of a family seen as a façade-like structure, in which faces are the windows.

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, France's best foreign book of the year.In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul... François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus—a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years—resulted in his banishment... and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggles to write two of his own books—a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father—that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

‘Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace … He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told.’ Sebastian Barry Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as ‘our most irresistible literary critic’ (New York Times). This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn – a classicist by training – uses the classics as a lens to think about urgent contemporary debates. There is much to surprise here. Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer’s epics to help explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the ‘bad boy of Athens’) about a wayward husband whose wife returns from the dead. There are essays on Sappho’s sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil’s Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Noël Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the author’s boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a writer. In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles with erudition, emotion and tart wit while his essays dance across eras, cultures and genres. This is a provocative collection which sees today’s master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.

This collection of essays exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made Daniel Mendelsohn "required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture" (The Daily Beast). Here Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in surprising and illuminating ways. Many of these essays examine how we continue to look to the Greeks and Romans as models: some argue for the surprising modernity of canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a "Greek DNA" in our responses to the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. Modern topics are treated, too, from the "aesthetics of victimhood" in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life to the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and from Game of Thrones to recent films about artificial intelligence--a subject, Mendelsohn reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. The collection also brings together for the first time a number of Mendelsohn's personal essays, including his "critic's manifesto" and a touching memoir of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault.

Nytt litterært mesterverk fra forfatteren av den internasjonale suksessen Forsvunnet - en fortelling om seks av seks millioner, som også i Norge fant et stort og begeistret publikum da den utkom i 2009. Daniel Mendelsohns nye bok er en sterk og bevegende skildring av forholdet mellom en 81 år gammel far og godt voksen sønn som er fastlåst i taushetsbelagte misforståelser - til de sammen legger ut på en livsforandrende dannelsesreise ansporet av Homers episke mesterverk, Odysseen. Reisen begynner når Daniels far melder seg på sønnens seminar om Homers verk, for å bøte på sin ungdoms forsømmelser av klassikerne. Den fortsetter når semesteret er over og forfatteren inviterer faren med på et middelhavscruise som følger Odyssevs reise i oldtiden. Den intime forbindelsen mellom Homers fortelling fra antikken og bokens utforskning av forholdet mellom far og sønn, fedre og sønner, gjør En odyssé til en sjelden opplevelse som mesterlig leser egne familierelasjoner i lys Homers evige klassiker. Hjemkomst er i Homers verden gjerne ensbetydende med døden. Slik går det også i Mendelsohns gripende fortelling. Reisen med Homer blir Jay Mendelsohns siste reise.

A New York Times/PBS NewsHour Book Club Pick From award-winning memoirist and critic, and bestselling author of The Lost: a deeply moving tale of a father and son's transformative journey in reading--and reliving--Homer's epic masterpiece. When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth--and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist. But through the sometimes uncomfortable months that the two men explore Homer's great work together--first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son's interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus's famous voyages--it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: Jay's responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last. As this intricately woven memoir builds to its wrenching climax, Mendelsohn's narrative comes to echo the Odyssey itself, with its timeless themes of deception and recognition, marriage and children, the pleasures of travel and the meaning of home. Rich with literary and emotional insight, An Odyssey is a renowned author-scholar's most triumphant entwining yet of personal narrative and literary exploration. Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and NewsdayA Kirkus Best Memoir of 2017Shortlisted for the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2017 WINNER OF THE PRIX MEDITERRANEE 2018 From the award-winning, best-selling writer: a deeply moving tale of a father and son's transformative journey in reading - and reliving - Homer's epic masterpiece.