But through the sometimes uncomfortable months that the two men explore Homer's great work together-first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son's interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus's famous voyages-it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: Jay's responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his 'one last chance' to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth-and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist. When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. Mendelsohn closes his invocation by returning to the 'Odyssey' to enumerate its themes we can already see that the story he is about to tell shares those themes, but their dense, complicated interplay in fiction and fact will take the entire book to unpack.From award-winning memoirist and critic, and bestselling author of The Lost: a deeply moving tale of a father and son's transformative journey in reading-and reliving-Homer's epic masterpiece. Mendelsohn, who 'felt that everything about me was hopelessly mushy and imprecise,' won Jay's grudging respect by mastering the rigorous grammars of Latin and ancient Greek, but the basic divide in their points of view remained.

As for its characters, we learn that Jay, a retired research scientist, intimidated his son for years with his contempt for everything 'soft,' his insistence that truth was hard and exact.

'The scope of its action, the identities of its characters, the nature of its themes.' From his proem, we learn that the action includes father and son taking a post-seminar Mediterranean cruise, 'Retracing the Odyssey,' just a few months before Jay took a fall that led to a massive stroke. He begins with 'Proem (Invocation)': 'The introductory lines that announce to the audience what the epic is about,' Mendelsohn explains.

An odyssey mendelsohn