Three rings A tale of exile, narrative, and fate

Bringing together memoir, history, and literary analysis, critic Mendelsohn (An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic) delivers a fine study of digression, exile, and circularity. Mendelsohn approaches his themes primarily through the lens of Homer's The Odyssey, in terms of its story line of a long-delayed arrival home, and of Homer's narrative technique of "ring composition," in which flashbacks and digressions are layered "in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls." He explains how this technique led him to a breakthrough with his previous book, and illustrates the technique here with digressions into the lives and work of other authors. These include German scholar Erich Auerbach, who wrote his masterpiece of literary analysis, Mimesis, which includes a chapter on ring composition, while fleeing Nazism; and 17th-century author François Fénelon, whose Odyssey adaptation The Adventures of Telemachus won him fame but also, thanks to its veiled criticisms of King Louis XIV, the loss of his post as royal tutor at Versailles. Mendelsohn's talent with descriptive detail brings his work alive, such as repeated descriptions of Auerbach, while exiled in Istanbul, gazing through a palace window over the turquoise Sea of Marmara. Mendelsohn never fails to entertain as he takes the reader across thousands of years' worth of literature and lives. (Aug.)

A father's death inspires a son's literary voyage. If Mendelsohn's previously acclaimed books The Lost (2013), a personal memoir about the Holocaust, and An Odyssey (2017), about his father's joyous discovery of Homer's book and death, are two rings, this is the third and final ring that interweaves and interlocks them together. Its "metamorphosis" began with lectures on the Odyssey at the author's alma mater, the University of Virginia. He was frustrated as he tried to shape them into a book until a friend suggested he write it as a "ring composition… elaborate series of interlocked narratives, each nested within another in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls." In the first of three sections, "The Lycée Français," Mendelsohn tells the story of Erich Auerbach, a German Jew who secured a position at the University of Istanbul, where he wrote the influential Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a "paean to the civilization of the continent he has just fled," a study in which the author "seeks to understand how literature makes reality feel real." In "The Education of Young Girls," Mendelsohn discusses the massively popular The Adventures of Telemachus, an "imitative and inventive" narrative about Odysseus' son written in the 1690s by the theologian François Fenelón. Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson were huge fans. In "The Temple," Mendelsohn examines The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, whose literary "meanderings," just like Mendelsohn's own book, "ultimately form a giant ring that ties together many disparate tales and experiences." This luminous narrative, in which the tales of each of Mendelsohn's three chosen exiled writers appealingly intertwine, is about many things--memory, literature, family, immigration, and religion--and it ends where it began, with a "wanderer" entering "an unknown city after a long voyage." This slender, exquisite book rewards on many levels. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.