Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate

Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate

Mendelsohn, Daniel

Paperback

Biographies GeneralLiterary FiguresLiterary Criticism

Publisher Price: $15.95

ISBN10: 1681376393
ISBN13: 9781681376394
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Apr 26 2022
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.40 Width: 4.80 Depth: 7.70
Language: English
A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers--Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald--and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis.

In a genre-defying book hailed as exquisite (The New York Times) and spectacular (The Times Literary Supplement), the best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own--works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus--a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years--resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W.G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.

Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggle to write two of his own books--a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father--that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

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