The stories of the Trojan War and Helen of Troy, the Sirens and the Cyclops are embedded in western culture, and here the award-winning author of A History of Reading and A Reading Diary explains how, in this biography of Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey. Beginning with their inception in ancient Greece, Alberto Manguel explores how these poems have reverberated through the Rome of Virgil and Horace, to James Joyce's Dublin and the Caribbean of Derek Walcott, via Dante and Racine.
"What Alberto Manguel gives us in his biography of the Iliad and the Odyssey is nothing less than a history of literature itself. An ambitious project—but one for which the author is perfectly qualified…. In one particularly brilliant passage, an analysis of the language that Homer uses to describe the dead in the Odyssey ends up crowding the page with poets summoned from any number of different periods: Milton and Verlaine, Shelley and Hopkins. It is as though Manguel has cast his own book as the trench that Odysseus filled with blood, so that the departed might have their voices restored to them."—The Spectator