Daniel Mendelsohn – författare

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017SHORTLISTED FOR THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2017WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDITERRANÉE 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. When eighty-one-year-old retired scientist Jay unexpectedly enrols in his estranged classicist son Daniel’s course on the Odyssey, the journey of a lifetime commences. Professor and student glean life lessons from the page over a semester and, that summer, son and father take to the sea to follow Odysseus’s epic trail. Reading Homer becomes their chance to understand each other before it’s too late. Theirs is a moving and erudite story of filial love and the importance of the classics. Rich with literary and emotional insight and weaving themes of deception and recognition, marriage and children, the pleasures of travel and the meaning of home, this is memoir writing at its finest.

‘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 BarryOver 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.

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.

Whether on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new novel or revisiting a classic work of literature, Daniel Mendelsohn's judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit. Now, in "How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken", we see all at once the overwhelming depth and intelligence infused in Mendelsohn's writings, as he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games. His striking interpretations of our most important films - from the work of Pedro Almodovar to "Brokeback Mountain", "United 93" and "World Trade Center", "300", "Troy", and "The Hours" - have sparked debate and changed the way we watch movies. Just as stunning and influential are his dispatches on theater and literature, from "The Producers" to Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex", from Euripides' "Medea" to "The letters of Truman Capote". "How Beautiful It Is" makes it clear that no other contemporary thinker is as engaged with as many aspects of our culture and its influences as Mendelsohn is.

This book is the first book-length study of Euripides' so-called 'political plays (Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women) to appear in half a century. Still disdained as the anomalously patriotic or propagandistic' works of a playwright elsewhere famous for his subversive, ironic artistic ethos, the two works in question, notorious for their uncomfortable juxtaposition of political speeches and scenes of extreme feminine emotion, continue to be dismissed by scholars of tragedy as artistic failures unworthy of the author of Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae. The present study makes use of recent insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender (in real life and on stage) and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the political plays are, in fact, intellectually subtle and structurally coherent exercises in political theorizing - works that use complex interactions between female and male characters to explore the advantages, and costs, of being a member of the polis.

This book is the first book-length study of Euripides' so-called 'political plays (Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women) to appear in half a century. Still disdained as the anomalously patriotic or propagandistic works of a playwright elsewhere famous for his subversive, ironic artistic ethos, the two works in question, notorious for their uncomfortable juxtaposition of political speeches and scenes of extreme feminine emotion, continue to be dismissed by scholars of tragedy as artistic failures unworthy of the author of Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae. The present study makes use of recent insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender (in real life and on stage) and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the political plays are, in fact, intellectually subtle and structurally coherent exercises in political theorizing - works that use complex interactions between female and male characters to explore the advantages, and costs, of being a member of the polis.

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.

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.

"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 odyssé är 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."BTJ

En 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