Daniel Mendelsohn

A charming collection of essays from the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Mendelsohn, who I first encountered in his memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, is a superb writer, and his comments and insights across our culture are thoughtful and revealing. I'll hold on to this to read again.

Daniel is very close to his mother's father, old-worldly, meticulous and the family story-teller. Daniel learns much from him but, of course, doesn't fully appreciate or understand this treasure until he is older. After his grandfather dies, Daniel researches basic family genealogy. Daniel wonders why such a good story-teller didn’t tell stories about his older brother, Shmiel, his wife and their 4 daughters.

Daniel decides to find and write Shmiel’s story. Over many years he performed show more multi-faceted research, studied family photos and letters, visited, and spoke with and interviewed family members as well as strangers from Bolechow who knew a little something about Shmiel, Esther or their daughters, or who had ‘witnessed’ or ‘heard about’ an occurrence to Shmiel, Esther or their daughters. Daniel pieced together not just their pre-mature, abrupt, horrific murders by the Nazis and Ukrainians but the beauty of their friendships and daily lives. Mendelsohn’s thoughts and feelings coalesced into a greater understanding of his grandfather’s hidden anguish and guilt, and the unwillingness to speak of Shmiel, the brother he couldn’t save.

Using analysis of the weekly Parshiot read in synagogue on Shabbat to counterbalance his family’s painful story is brilliant. Especially meaningful to Daniel are the Torah segments about divisiveness between brothers; perhaps because Daniel had broken his brother, Matthew’s arm when young. And perhaps because he realized the guilt his grandfather suffered.

I both enjoyed and was saddened by everything Daniel shared but did feel the book ran on too long. show less

Daniel Mendelsohn is a name that whenever and wherever it appears, I will read what he has written. I know I will get a thoughtful, educated, serious examination of whatever topic, book, film, TV show, whatever it is. I will learn something new, be shown something in a new light, and will seek out new things to read or to look at. This collection comprises primarily essays previously published in the NY Review of Books or the New Yorker; so the material may not be new to subscribers, but show more many were new to me. And there is not a clinker in the bunch.

A classicist by training, Mendelsohn often manages to tie his ostensible subject (the Boston Marathon bombers, Game of Thrones, robots...) to issues and dramas plumbed back in ancient Greece or Rome, in ways that enlighten both and serve to underscore the universalities and humanity across the millennia. He is a master (and staunch defender, god love him) of the art of the negative review: even when he is critical, it is expressed with patience, serious attention, concrete examples, and careful reasoning. There is a lovely, poignant piece on his long epistolary relationship with the novelist Mary Renault, whose stories set in the ancient world lit up his attraction to the classics and his sexuality as a teenager. (Sad to say, not ONE of her books is owned by my local affluent, educated, suburban public library, so I must search farther afield.) His lengthy (necessarily...) piece on Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume "autofiction" oeuvre is an insightful consideration of that monument of weirdly compelling (at least some of the time) self-absorption. He concludes, pithily and brilliantly, that Knausgaard (as does Hitler in his own "Struggle") tends to focus entirely on the "I" and the "they" of his writing, leaving no room for "you"... the reader. The final piece, "A Critic's Manifesto," made me want to stand up and cheer: everything I had intuited, sought, and admired in Mendelsohn's work turns out to be exactly what he aims and strives for. Well done, sir. Please hurry up and write more. My brain is waiting for a blast of oxygen. show less

A few years ago, my read-aloud group read through Fagle's Odyssey, and it made me curious about this title. Mendelsohn is teaching a seminar on The Odyssey, and his elderly father asks to sit in, to refresh his memory from his high school days. For the reader, this becomes a dual text: fascinating notes about the Odyssey itself, and a wonderful meditation on fathers and sons, particularly this father and son, so different from each other. As the ancient story moves forward, the son reflects show more on his father's reactions as well as his own, and his students' responses, and the search for the father parallels in many ways Odysseus's journey home. Bronson Pinchot read the audiobook I listened to, and I loved every minute of it. show less