The Lost Books of the Odyssey

In 2007, Zachary Mason published his first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. The idea of the book is that these forty-four variations on the plots and characters of Homer’s Odyssey aren’t the work of Mason – instead, they are translations of snippets he found on a papyrus that contained a version of the story that didn’t end up making it into Homer’s final draft. In an over-the-top parody of a literary hoax, Mason calls himself “the John Shade Professor of Archeocryptology and Paleomathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford.” He claims that he has pieced together myths about Odysseus that were floating around before Homer wrote his definitive story, creating “a product of pure analysis rather than mere human artifice” out of some stuff found in the “rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus” (a real-life archaeological trove).

The style of the short alternative Odysseys calls to mind works by Jorge Luis Borges or parts of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities because Mason is riffing off the nuances in Homer’s work, expanding the epic’s odd or unexplained moments until he has turned the original inside out. Mason doesn’t introduce new elements into his novel – his characters are the same figures from Greek mythology that readers are already familiar with, like Achilles, the Cyclops Polyphemus and the loyal swineherd Eumaios. Instead, he remixes the original by doing things such as retelling the story of Persephone and Hades as though it actually happened to Helen and Paris, for example, or sending Achilles to a heaven that is not anything like what the Greeks imagined Elysium to be.

There is no room in this summary to recap all forty-four of Mason’s inventive Odyssean variations, but here are a few that have stood out to readers as particularly engaging or memorable.



The novel’s first lost book is “A Sad Revelation,” which focuses on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. In Homer’s version, he finds his house taken over by suitors vying for the hand of his long-suffering wife, Penelope, who has refused to give up hope that Odysseus would come back. In Mason’s version, Odysseus returns to find a “soft, gray and heavy” man sleeping near the fire. It has been ten years, and a prudent Penelope has remarried. Odysseus ruefully considers his defeat, but then decides that this vision isn’t real, but instead “a vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god.” He runs away to a new fate elsewhere.

“Guest Friend” features a long conversation between Alkinoos, king of the Phaecians, and Odysseus. The king tells his guest his belief “that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else.” After a long, winding, and mazelike discussion, Alkinoos disappears from the chapter, and Odysseus’s voice merges with that of the still-unknown narrator – the metafictional recreation of the self-referential philosophy of Alkinoos.

In “Agamemnon and the Word,” this leader of the Greek assault on Troy asks his advisors to write a book explaining everything in the world. Lifetimes are spent constructing examples of such work, but each time one is brought to Agamemnon, he demands a shorter and more concise version. At last, what he really wants is one single word to sum up existence – a word that Odysseus delivers engraved on a ring. The king puts on the rings and immediately dies. We never learn what this word is – nor do we know whether Agamemnon died because his request was finally met, or because the ring was poisoned.



Odysseus narrates two chapters, “Fragment” and “The Iliad of Odysseus.” He is either an incorrigible liar or, in reality, the cruel coward who is desperate to feign illness to avoid having to fight, as described in Virgil’s Aeneid (an epic in which the Trojans are our vantage point on the war). “The Iliad of Odysseus” ends with Odysseus bribing a slave to murder Helen and then becoming a bard who goes around telling heroic stories about Odysseus, the great hero of the war. In both chapters, Mason wonders why we believe anything Odysseus tells us in the original Odyssey, asking whether Odysseus should instead be read as literature’s first unreliable narrator.

Polyphemus the Cyclops – a blinded monster standing in for the traditional view of Homer as a blind bard – narrates of “Blindness.” Polyphemus has ordered his life for the maximum alone time in his cave, a peace that is disrupted by Odysseus and his tricks. Polyphemus tells us that, of course, he wasn’t fooled when Odysseus called himself Nobody but thought it was impolite to ask questions: “a strange moniker, I thought at the time, but it would have been unseemly to comment.” When we sympathize with the “bad” guy, we can see how the categories of good and evil are a product of the storyteller’s perspective.

“Epiphany” provides an alternate explanation for all of the horrors suffered by Odysseus on his way home from Troy. Although he would come to blame it on the rage of Poseidon, this cover story is meant to obscure the real truth – Odysseus’s sufferings come because Athena has deserted him after he rejected her love. When she, his divine protector, offers him herself and immortality, he is horrified, like “a child watching his father, incorruptible and immovable, beyond all weak human passion, dissolve into tears.”



When Odysseus goes to recruit Achilles to fight at Troy, in “The Myrmidon Golem,” instead of succeeding as he does in the original epic, he finds the heroic warrior dead from a snake bite to the heel. Odysseus uses Jewish mysticism to create a clay golem as a stand-in for Achilles, and no one can tell that the silent killer isn’t the real thing. Still, “In the confusion of battle, with friend and foe besmirched with white earth and blood, he sometimes killed at random, ignoring the Greeks’ terrified, indignant cries, and so became feared by Greek and Trojan alike.”

In the novel’s end chapter, “Last Islands,” an old Odysseus, still filled with wanderlust, retraces his voyage back to Troy. Every place is less exciting than he remembers. When he finally reaches Troy, it has become a tourist destination with performers reenacting the war in costume. He sees actors dressed as Hector and Achilles pantomiming their climactic battle with wooden swords, and then sees a third man coming up with “his face made up in a leer of cruel cunning” – it’s the actor playing Odysseus, of course. It doesn’t matter what actually happened – this is how he will be remembered.