Daniel Mendelsohn – författare

"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

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 Chabon

In 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.

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.

In 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.