In Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey (Douglas & McIntyre), Alberto Manguel gives us a biography of the two books that he feels have, “more than any others . . . fed the imagination of the Western world for over two and a half millennia.” Manguel recounts various theories on the origins of these epic poems, including Samuel Butler’s suggestion that Homer was “a young unmarried woman, and a native of Sicily.”
By Robert B. Strassler, ed.; Andrea L. Purvis, trans.
Reviewed by Michael Hayward
Those who have read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Vintage), and those who have seen the film version, will remember that the sole possession of the eponymous patient, Count László de Almásy, was a battered copy of Herodotus’s Histories, an 1890 edition that he had turned into a kind of commonplace book with the inclusion of “other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books.”
As an avid long-distance cyclist who also loves to be pulled into a good adventure story, I could not resist Cioma Schönhaus’s book The Forger (Granta), a memoir that describes how Schönhaus lived in hiding in wartime Berlin while working clandestinely as a forger of identity cards.
Remember those student days when, in preparation for your final exam, you’d optimistically sit through a movie version as a substitute for the book itself?
Mathieu Kassovitz was just twenty-eight years old when he made La Haine (Criterion dvd), a 1995 film released in black and white and set in les banlieues, the racially volatile suburbs that surround Paris like an explosive vest.
A good essayist is at all times quizzical, and in Phantom Limb (Thistledown) Theresa Kishkan is better than good as she explores the complexity and magic of the natural world, extracting what is essential from the sacred as well as from the mundane.
In The Architects Are Here (Viking), Michael Winter revisits his fictional alter ego Gabriel English, who has previously appeared as a central figure in two short story collections and in This All Happened, Winter’s first novel (published in 2000).
The first time I saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, Criterion dvd) was in the Cedar V Theatre, a Quonset-style, single-screen movie house on Lynn Valley Road in North Vancouver: 25 cents for a science-fiction double bill in 1965.
Fair Play, a brief novel by Tove Jansson, is available for the first time in an English translation by Thomas Teale. To quote from the original cover copy, Fair Play is about “two women who share a life of work, delight and consternation,” a relationship that is modelled on the real-life partnership of Jansson and her companion, the Finnish graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä.
