This week's New Yorker carries an article by a critic, David Denby, which I started reading thinking it was a review of the new IMAX movie "The Odyssey," and although he begins with the movie, he quickly admits he hasn't seen it yet, and what the article is about is the whole "return home" story genre.
But my mind wandered off to The Iliad and the Odyssey quickly and away from trying to place it in a canon of literature.
For me, the story is personal.
On my eleventh Christmas, I opened a long flat present last, knowing it was a book. I had got the presents I was hoping for--a new baseball mitt, other important eleven year old boy stuff, and here was a book.
It was a big book, seventeen by fourteen inches, the Giant Golden book series, this one by Alan and Alice Provensen, illustrators. It was called "The Iliad and the Odyssey." The illustration on the cover and those throughout the book struck me as strange and off putting. I was accustomed to illustrations from Marvel comics and Mad Magazine, but these were ethereal, different.
"What is this?" I asked my parents.
"Read it," my mother said, smiling.
"But what is it?"
"Read it and find out."
She seemed secretly amused, and that annoyed me, and she was atypically closed mouthed about this whole thing, so naturally, I set the book aside, but in the late afternoon of a quiet, boring Christmas day, I finally opened it up.
I had read Golden Book Bible Stories and Aesop's fables, and other stuff which seemed a little like this book, but there were no morals at the end of a page in this one.
There were gods and warriors which should have been enough for an eleven year old boy, but the art was so strange and the language so flat and neutral, as it described the rage which propelled the Iliad.
And these people were killing each other, and it wasn't clear to me exactly where Helen stood in her own mind. She was some Greek's wife but she seemed pretty passive, standing behind and peering through the wall at Troy as the battles raged.
My mother called me down for dinner that night, but by then I was completely hooked and did not answer. She came to the door and I looked up momentarily, and she closed the door behind her, but I could hear her tell my father I wouldn't be down for dinner.
"He's reading," she told him.
I lugged that book with me to college in Providence, R.I., to medical school in New York City, to a farm in southern Rhode Island, to New Haven and back again to Washington, D.C. when I finally moved back "home."
I had been gone 16 years, got as far as 500 miles up the east coast, but in all the moves and packing and boxes, I made sure that book did not get lost.
I had fought some monsters and had some adventures in my travels, but nothing as magical as the Odyssey.
When I had sons of my own, I read it to them. When they were four and six, we had a bedtime routine: The older boy lay in his upper bunk and the younger one sat in my lap on a reading chair. As I read each page, I'd hold up the book so the older boy in his perch could see the illustrations.
They absolutely loved that book.
It had warriors and fighting, and gods doing magic in the Iliad, and in the Odyssey there were monsters and narrow escapes, the ultimate sci fi super hero stuff.
When my younger son read the Iliad in his freshman high school English class, the teacher, who thought he was something of a dolt, a dumb jock admitted to the private school because of his athletic ability, got a shock when she asked the class about Zeus's wife, Hera.
"He's frightened of her," my younger son told her. "He might be king of the gods, but he's afraid of his wife."
The teacher was so stunned she mentioned it twice during our parent/teacher conference.
"He reads with more insight than anyone in that class," she marveled.
"It's a boy's book," I told her. "Among other things. Boys don't have to be explained what is going on during that war. How are the girls in the class liking it?"
"Odd you should mention that," she said. "They read it. But they do better with 'Pride and Prejudice.'"
When my older son went off to college, he took a freshman course called "Anger," and the first book they read was the Iliad.
"Good grief," I told him. "We thought Columbia was hidebound and ossified because they insisted every freshmen read 'the classics' beginning with the Iliad and here you are at freewheeling NYU, and you're reading the same damn thing. And this is a course about anger."
"Well," my son explained patiently, "There isn't very much in the Iliad but anger."
I still have the book. It's now nearly 70 years old and it's getting rebound this summer.
I tried reading it to my seven year old grand daughter.
She was polite, but not really taken. She's more into "Moana" and "Frozen."
To her credit, she did like "Banshees of Inisherin," until her mother walked in during the finger cutting scene and rescued her from her incorrigible grandfather.
Maybe she'll circle back and pick up the Iliad and the Odyssey later.
But I do think it's a boy's book, politically incorrect as that statement might be.
I'll definitely go see the movie, but, for my money, I'll be very surprised if anything on screen can ever match the Provensen's and their Giant Golden Book.
