Zachary Mason's novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey is, despite the title, neither a poem nor an epic. Nor, some would probably argue, is it a novel. It is, however, deeply absorbing. The book's elaborate introduction claims that this collection of "fragments" is the decoded version of a text "dating from classical Greece or earlier" (xiii), purporting to anthologize the work of the Homerids (who were real). These fragments have been decoded, our author/editor/translator claims, with the rather belated help of Raymond Llull (or Lully), whose Ars Magna purportedly contains the "eleven keys" (xiv) essential to cracking the encryption. (Apparently, Lully had managed to decode the text himself.) Not complicated enough yet? There turn out to be "an ordered set of forty-six" key combinations (xiv-xv)--the number of fragments in the novel. As a footnote explains, "[t]he first story is produced by applying the first key to the raw text, the second by applying the second key to the indecipherable results of the first decoding, and so on. In this way, the chapters of the Lost Books have a natural ordering" (xv). Still not complicated enough? Don't worry. Now, having decrypted the text, the "translator" discovers that there some fragments in here that clearly don't belong, chronologically speaking (one dates to the Renaissance [xv-xvi), and that, to make matters even worse, the "highly ambiguous" language consists "in a compressed, grammarless shorthand consisting of sequences of noun/modifier pairs" (xvi), sans "spacing and punctuation" (xvi). To the reader's no very great surprise, the translator explains that one of the theories about the result is that the text is actually nonsense, and "that the Lost Books were composed not by bards thousands of years dead but, thanks to the universal capacity to see form in purest entropy, by me" (xviiii).
While the labyrinthine complexity of this mock-scholarly introduction should remind the reader of other great works of faux scholarship, like Pope's The Dunciad, it also introduces a number of themes integral to the text. To begin with, there are the thematic keys: "Time, Memory, Desire, Revenge, The Gods, The Dead, Departures, Returns, Word, Deception and Doubles" (xiv). Each fragment begins with the key or key that unlocks it. But in a sense, such keys conceal as much as they reveal. That is, while the keys conveniently categorize each fragment, they cannot be said to unlock fully what each fragment does. There's a play on one popular model of literary interpretation here, the kind that treats the text as something with a concealed, deep meaning that can be revealed by applying the proper decryption tool. In addition, the introduction raises a problem that haunts the fragments themselves: where is the boundary between translation and creation? Although the introduction quickly escalates into parody on that score--the "compressed, grammarless shorthand" can be rendered in any number of completely incompatible ways--the Lost Books keep returning to moments of figurative translation, in which characters change their nature, their shape, or their state of existence. To what extent, some of the fragments ask, is it possible to find the "original"--to return home, for example?
Then, of course, there's the question of authorship. The novel playfully alludes to its status as an elaborate hoax by making its dominant author Odysseus, the liar and trickster. In fact, a couple of tales, "The Iliad of Odysseus" and "Fragment," turn Odysseus into an epic poet; the Odyssey is merely "one of his lies," later appropriated by Homer (61). But the author's authority is at stake. In a universe ruled by fickle gods, who gets to control the narrative? Many of the fragments turn on the link between storytelling and survival--often literally, frequently figuratively--in which Odysseus finds that making up a convincing fiction is the best way of bending reality to your immediate needs. In "Guest Friend," a king tells Odysseus that "[a]mong the Phaecians it is believed that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else" (11), a belief that Odysseus soon turns to deadly advantage. This theme reappears in "One Kindness," in which Odysseus comes across three women whom readers will recognize as the Three Fates; when Odysseus manages to sneak in a suggestion, one of them comments that "he is, for all that he is bound by us, allowed just once to direct his fate, though I for one shall not seek his counsel" (37). Odysseus the author is himself subjected to a higher authorship, with even his apparently unplanned interjection already accounted for. This problem of agency--who authors whom?--appears most starkly in the time-loop fragments, like "Fugitive" and "The Long Way Back," where the characters find themselves trapped in a story that endlessly repeats itself. The characters break out of the loop, but the results seem ominous instead of liberating.
If we think about it further, such imperfect looping is the novel's dominant image of the relationship between author and creation: there is no way to end the cycle of creating and being created, to identify the author and bring him (or her) out on top. And, by the same token, the creation--whether person or text--soon escapes the creator's control. As the king in "Guest Friend" suggests, the actual author is always somewhere else, but even that author may be subject to outside influences (like the Three Fates in "One Kindness"). Odysseus tricks even the gods, inserting them into his story, only to be tricked by them in turn. Then again, perhaps Odysseus tricks himself as well; as he muses in "Last Islands," "[o]ne day I realized that I had told the stories of the cyclops, the sirens and the duel with Ajax so many times that I no longer remembered the actual events so much as their retellings and the retellings' retellings, which through a gradual accretion of spurious detail and embellishment had, for all I knew, diverged drastically from the truth" (197). If the teller no longer knows if the story is true or not, where is the original? Is there any possibility of return? By the end of this fragment, Odysseus and some of his former crew have repeated the Odyssey in reverse, unable to find any traces of their previous adventures, and find themselves arriving at a Troy which has been turned into...a tourist trap. The ending, which shifts abruptly from first to third person, both affirms the Odyssey (we hear from Athena) and wryly suggests that, after all, there is no way of returning exactly to a story's point of origin.
The most extreme loop occurs in "The Book of Winter," in which Odysseus' eternal self-invention turns into an act of entire self-erasure...or so it seems. "The Book of Winter" features an unidentified speaker who, alone in a hut and unable to remember anything, comes across a book about Odysseus. Taking the book as a form of direct address, the speaker muses that "[t]he allegorical possibilities are many, and the number of codes it could conceal are infinite, but it could be a simpler, more nearly literal message--perhaps it is, in some small way, my story" (119). In fact, he concludes, "the text is corrupt, or, if not corrupt, then incomplete, or of a calculated obscurity" (119). All of this sounds suspiciously like the frame narrative surrounding the Lost Books, complete with interpretation as an act of decoding. By effectively emending the "corrupt" text, however, this reader concludes that he must be Odysseus, who has saved himself from Poseidon by erasing his own memory; to complete this self-transformation, he burns the book and becomes "no one" (e.g., Nemo, Nobody) (120). But has Odysseus erased himself, or has the book created another Odysseus? This, too, brings us back to the fiction of translation in the faux-scholarly introduction: in decoding and translating the Lost Books, has our author/translator/editor brought out what is there--or what, thanks to tradition, he believes must be there? Or, to put it differently, does the book's title call the text into being?
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