The Odyssey

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Literature

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Film

Maybe you dozed through an inept translation of this in school, or saw some campy old movie that took great liberties with the text. I say give it another try. This is simply, the proto-adventure book, the mythic human iconograph of everything that we consider to be a story. Maybe you have it confused in your head with the Iliad, also a pretty good read, but way more confusing than the Odyssey, or the Aeniad, which is Virgil's pro-Roman sequel to this book, and a real bore.

The Odyssey is one man's heroic attempt to get home after the tragic end of the Trojan war, which is the subject of the Iliad (Remember? The one with everyone in the belly of the big wooden horse? Worth reading just so you can chuckle over the strange plot line that keeps the major hero, Achilles, sulking in his tent through most of the story over a slave-girl instead of kicking ass out on the battlefield with the rest of the boys). Odysseus wanders around all of these very cool enchanted Greek islands encountering various magical monsters and even falling in love with Circe for a very long time, until he finally makes it back home.

Here's where the plot really picks up: His house, wife and son are virtually prisoners by a crowd of so-called "suitors" who are all ostensibly vying for the hand of his wife Penelope in marriage. He disguises himself as a penniless beggar whom no-one, not even his own son, can recognize. After all, he's been gone many years, and who would expect a rich nobleman like himself to travel around as a penniless beggar. But here's the cool thing about Homer: It's so real! Of course a guy who'd been wandering around from island to island trying to find his way back home for years would show up penniless and unrecognized!

It's not hard to identify with Odysseus as he becomes infuriated watching this crowd of neighborhood men coming into his house night after night, eating up all of his food, treating his slaves like dirt (Why should they care? They're not their slaves!) and constantly yowling for his wife to come on down and pick one of them to marry so they can take over the riches and lands that are his.

By this time in the book, I'm totally hooked. I just can't wait to see Odysseus figure out a way to prove who he is and punish this crowd of miscreants.

When I finished the Odyssey, I was turning pages as fast as I have any modern best seller, totally emotionally consumed by the desire to see the hero get his revenge and wife back. I couldn't believe it. Who wrote this stuff? This is the kind of stuff I like to read! Maybe I just got a good translation, or maybe I'm just more than ordinarily interested in the ancient Greeks, but this book is the first great book ever written, in my humble opinion, and maybe worth a reread if you think differently.

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