'Three Rings' Review: Getting Lost (and Found) with Odysseus

Mr. Mendelsohn’s eighth full-length work is itself a book that springs from other books, including his own. It is a brief but bountiful mashup of criticism, literary biography, craft essay and personal history. As always, the author’s voice blends authority with considerable warmth and charm, luring readers into his complex intellectual enthusiasms.

“Find the beginning,” Homer exhorts the Muse in Emily Wilson’s recent translation of the “Odyssey.” “Three Rings” starts, as the “Odyssey” does, in medias res. In 2016, after four years of struggling to write a book about the last year of his father’s life, Mr. Mendelsohn found himself in a state of what the Greeks call aporia, “a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem.”

After a mentor observed that Mr. Mendelsohn’s 600-page manuscript was a series of discrete episodes and not yet a story, the author searched for a new path. He reacquainted himself with a literary technique called ring composition, a device that had been familiar to him since his undergraduate days, when he first began to study the “Odyssey.”

Ring composition describes a narrative that seems to veer into a series of digressions but in truth is traveling in a circle, returning in the end to the particular moment from which it strayed. Homer shows his hero Odysseus, meandering in a circuitous route toward Ithaca, as a man of “many turns,” a description that mirrors the roundabout structure of the “Odyssey” itself. Ring composition also appears in the “Histories” of Herodotus and in many other landmarks of European literature, including “Beowulf” and “Tristram Shandy.” The early-20th-century modernists were fond of the structure too, particularly Marcel Proust, as Mr. Mendelsohn spends some pages elucidating here.

It was ring composition that rescued Mr. Mendelsohn from aporia and provided the map for the book about his father, published in 2017 and titled “An Odyssey.” It also led him to further meditations on the technique in his latest book, whose interlocking rings connect the “Odyssey” to the works of three European writers in exile: Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon and W.G. Sebald.

If “Three Rings” were only a survey of circular narratives, it would be interesting enough, as Mr. Mendelsohn has honed a prose style that is nuanced yet clear, without a hint of pedantry, and one is always glad to learn what he has to teach. (In addition to writing books and essays, he is a professor of Humanities at Bard College.) But he’s after something more ambitious here than a literary jeu d’esprit. Adding memoir and biography, he reminds himself and his readers that books are vulnerable objects. They are all too easily banned, burned, buried among collapsing civilizations, and forgotten. Even if books engender other books, there are no guarantees for their own survival.

That the “Odyssey” itself has survived for nearly three millennia is more a fateful caprice than a divine right. As Mr. Mendelsohn notes, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are the only two long poems that remain of the eight that once comprised the Epic Cycle, relating the adventures of heroes in the Trojan War and their homecoming after. The other six works have all been lost, he writes, “manuscripts, after all, being only as safe as the libraries in which they reside.”

Lost libraries haunt the pages of “Three Rings,” particularly when Mr. Mendelsohn turns his attention to the German-Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach, who wrote a masterpiece of literary criticism in the mid-1940s called “Mimesis.” Auerbach traces Western literature’s evolving efforts to represent reality, starting with the uses of ring composition in the “Odyssey” and ending with the fracturing of consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel “To the Lighthouse.” Most of his book’s chapters begin with the quotation of a passage from the work under discussion—these appear in seven languages: Latin, Occitan, Provençal, Italian, French, German and English—and proceed with unmatched erudition and originality to explore each work’s attempt, in Mr. Mendelsohn’s words, to make “reality feel real.”

Auerbach’s achievement is made all the more astonishing by the fact that he wrote his book about books in a place with limited access to books. Having fled Nazi Germany in 1935, stripped of his job as a professor of Romance philology at the University of Marburg and forced to abandon his home and his library, he managed to secure an academic position in Istanbul, which was then admitting some scholars in an attempt to refashion itself as a European capital.

The libraries in 1940s Istanbul were respectable but offered nothing like the access to critical scholarship that Auerbach had once taken for granted in Germany. He wrote to a colleague that the University of Istanbul “was quite good for a guest performance, but certainly not for long-term work.” He stayed for a decade and spent three of those years writing “Mimesis” in an office overlooking the Sea of Marmara.

In his epilogue, Auerbach admitted to a hidden advantage in his new situation: “If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects,” he wrote, “I might never have reached the point of writing.” It was imperative that he did. Auerbach constructed “Mimesis” as a bulwark against the Nazis’ book burnings and ransacking of libraries, intent as they were on destroying all traces of culture that threatened to invalidate their crude ideology. For him, writing “Mimesis” was a defiant effort to rescue the entire canon of European humanism, an “almost touchingly grandiose” scheme, as Mr. Mendelsohn writes, “to construct a kind of model of the mind of the past.”

Grandeur and intimacy are the poles between which all ambitious writers suspend their work. There is a sense in both the “Odyssey” and in “Mimesis” that their authors are capable of reaching through time to speak companionably to every reader. Mr. Mendelsohn’s books are distinguished by this kind of approachability as well, particularly “The Lost” (2006), an account of his search to uncover the fates of his family members during the Holocaust, and his 2017 book about his father’s last year. As he did in those books, in “Three Rings” Mr. Mendelsohn tempers monumentality with injections of autobiography. In a meditation on Calypso’s cave, for instance, he wonders whether his lifelong fear of enclosed spaces might be a symptom of inherited trauma. These snippets of memoir might appear to be digressions. But, like the “Odyssey,” they come around.
The Calypso discussion introduces the second of Mr. Mendelsohn’s exiled writers, the 17th-century French archbishop François Fénelon, who served as tutor to the 7-year-old Duke of Burgundy, the eventual heir of Louis XIV. With the intention of teaching ethics to his charge, Fénelon wrote a didactic sequel to the “Odyssey” called “The Adventures of Telemachus” that begins on Calypso’s island and ends with Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, returning to Ithaca. Soon after the tales were published in 1699, Fénelon was exiled to the far north of France as punishment for his narrative’s thinly disguised critiques of the Sun King. Nonetheless, “The Adventures of Telemachus” became an enduringly popular international sensation, spawning countless translations, provoking the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, and eventually earning frequent allusions in Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”

The last of Mr. Mendelsohn’s “Odyssey”-connected writers, born in 1944 in Bavaria, was the novelist W.G. Sebald, who, besieged with inherited guilt for the atrocities of the Third Reich, left Germany in the 1960s for a life of self-exile in England. While “The Rings of Saturn,” Mr. Mendelsohn’s favorite of Sebald’s books, is endlessly digressive, its use of ring composition is “designed to confuse” rather than illuminate, Mr. Mendelsohn writes; “if Proust’s ring appears to us as a container, filled with all of human experience, Sebald’s embraces a void.” Forced to wander, longing for home, Sebald somehow continued to engage in the procreative act of writing, reaching out to readers while trapped in a permanent state of estrangement.

In Erich Auerbach’s office in Istanbul, a six-hour drive and 32 centuries away from the ancient city of Troy, the author of “Mimesis” had dreamed of a universal literature that would connect all the cultures of the world. “It was a concept that he clung to with a tenacity you can only call poignant, given the specific history of his own times,” writes Mr. Mendelsohn. “Three Rings,” a short but profoundly moving work, clings with the same tenacity to a belief in the regenerative power of literature. Companionably and creatively, it reaches back through eras of wars and plagues and cataclysms to offer readers a reassuringly long view of the vigor of the “Odyssey,” the book that launched a thousand books.

width="1" height="1">



—Ms. Rifkind is the author of “The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood.”