Odysseus and Polyphemus in an 1896 oil painting by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.

And it is an understandable way to take on an often shamelessly misogynistic and patriarchal culture. The gold-lettered-on-the-cover bestseller Miller specializes in impeccably modern reinterpretations of the Homeric material, and has now followed up her feminist rescue of the Odyssey’s treacherous nymph Kirke with a retort to Ovid’s misogynistic version of the story of the sculptor Pygmalion and his artificial woman Galatea. That’s about it the similarities stretch. It is Odysseus’ scars that appear, of course, both in Miller’s modern retelling of the story of the Iliad’s hero Achilles and his faithful squire Patroklos and in Mendelsohn’s essayistic meditation on his father and the relationship with him, seen through their shared interest in the Odyssey. Both have, in their home country of the United States, taken on the Homeric epic and found plenty of both subtext and psychological depth in it, in a way that was both noticed and successful. It is quite obvious that neither Daniel Mendelsohn nor Madeline Miller belong to Auerbach’s school. Just a story’s eternal now where “what is told is the only thing that exists, both on stage and in the reader’s mind.”Īuthor Daniel Mendelsohn has written about the relationship with his father, seen through their shared interest in the Odyssey. No subtext, no hidden motivation, no psychological complexity of the stereotypical protagonists (the many-suggested Odysseus, the horse-taming Hektor). This, the great German literary critic Erich Auerbach argued in his classic study “Mimesis”, was a typical feature of the classic epic.

The odyssey book