Neu gelesen: (als E-Book)

Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey A Father, a Son and an Epic

Jedesmal wenn ich bei einer Lesung vorab Auszüge aus dem Buch höre, freue ich mich darauf sie später zu lesen, eingebettet in ihren Kontext. Hier war es die Szene, in der das Seminar über die Odyssee beginnt, an dem Mendelsohn Sr. teilnimmt (und seinen Sohn zumindest anfangs ziemlich nervt). Leider dauert es hier ein bißchen, bis es endlich soweit ist, bis Seite 57 oder besser gesagt 24% von dem Buch, fast ein Viertel. Nicht das der Teil des Buches, in dem es nicht um das Seminar oder auch die Kreuzfahrt geht, uninteressant wäre, eher im Gegenteil, aber mir gefielen die Teile doch am besten, und machten mir am meisten Lust, es wirklich einmal mit der Odyssee zu probieren, nun da sovieles daraus was mir nie aufgefallen wäre, einen viel tieferen Sinn ergibt. (Ob auf deutsch oder vielleicht auf englisch muss ich mir noch überlegen).
Irgendwie ist es ironisch: früher, auf der Uni, hatten mir Seminare über Bücher, die ich bis dahin wirklich schätzte, eher leidig gemacht. Vielleicht wäre das heute anders. Bei so einem Semimar bestimmt.
.

Whatever else it may mean, the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diamtetrically opposed interpretations suggest a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts - one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

Homer's skillful manipulation of the parallel homecomings reminds us of a familiar psychological truth: that a strong sense of what our own family is like, what its weaknesses and strengths are, the relative degrees of its conventionality and eccentricity, its normalcy and pathology, is often impossible to establish until we are old enough to compare it intelligently with the families of others; something we start doing only when we begin to perceive, as happens at the end of childhood, that our family is not, in fact, the entire world.

Children always imagine that their parents' truest selves are as parents; but why? Who really knows his own begetting?" Telemachus bitterly asks early in the Odyssey. Who indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them.

Something Brendan had said that day echoed in my mind. I wonder if you think we could say it's a story about listening? About how your own perspective affects how you hear things? I mean, the real problem in this story is that from the very start Polyphemus hears what he wants to hear.
I'd heard what I wanted to hear. And I'd seen what I wanted to see, too - and failed to notice, again, what had been right before my eyes. I remember how irritated I'd been with my father at various points during the semester for being aloof from the students, for sitting in his chair off to the left behind my shoulder and referring to Madeline and Nina and Blond Tom with toneless pronouns, I agree with what she said, I agree with what he said, and yet all that time he'd been getting to know them, taking the trouble to listen to them. All semester long I'd vainly envisioned myself as some kind of pedagogical Odysseus, leading them on a thrilling adventure through the text, and in the end I'd turned out to be the Cyclops.

(Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssee. A Father, a Son and an epic, 2017)