Daniel Mendelsohn

speaker

599 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Daniel Mendelsohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The History of Literature · 817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

Text and I don't mean that in the sense of it's better than other texts, but it's great because of its

inexhaustible richness as a text and it has room for all of these responses on the part of the reader and that you know everyone can go into it and come out with something different and that's what's great about it.

Well, I think but you're you're touching on one of the greatest things about the Odyssey.

So and I think your evolving feeling about it is part of what the Odyssey is actually about.

So what I mean by that is I think if you sort of went out onto the street and grabbed random people and asked them what the Odyssey was about, even if they don't really

know that much about it and have never read it, they kind of have a sense that it's about this guy who's been at war for twenty years and is trying to get home to his wife.

That much at least I think people know about the story.

And that, you know, at a certain level that's a

That's an irresistible tale, right?

Homecoming, right?

It's a very deep seated.

A deep-seated human thing, the desperation to get back to your place of origin.

And I think that's one way into the Odyssey.

It's an irresistible story because as we were mentioning before in our discussion of books one through four, you know, the beginning of the Odyssey raises the question of what is this place that he's desperately trying to.

come back to.

And in fact, it turns out, and you know this from book one going on, that it's quite different from the place that he left.

Not least because we left it.

There's been no king, there's been no political activity, the social fabric has frayed, the domestic situation is a nightmare.

So already at the beginning of the Odyssey.

There's a question mark over the term home.

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