Mendelsohn has a habit of writing genre-defying books. Like The Elusive Embrace and An Odyssey, Three Rings is a braid of memoir, criticism, and classical scholarship. Revivifying mythology for contemporary readers, Mendelsohn makes you want to read Homer and Virgil, not to check the boxes in that canonical syllabus we carry in our heads, but because he turns them into diagnosticians of the human heart. You read Mendelsohn reading Homer and have an uncanny sense that they know you. This is a tes...

Three Rings by Daniel Mendelsohn is not quite a book; it is a compilation of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia and developed into a discursive essay but published as a book. What's the difference? At a basic level, I found myself 40% through Three Rings on my Kindle and thought how strange, I'm still in the introduction, aren't I? Beyond length, Three Rings lacks heft in terms of some of its major subjects. I wanted to read more about W.G.Sebald, but what I found was a summary of

Fascinating, ambitious, thought-provoking.

Reading this book was like attending a fascinating lecture on the intersectionality of literature, literary criticism and life itself. Ok, so not quite like a lecture, the experience is one sided and there’s no way to ask questions, but very similar in the way you get to just sit back and be awed by someone’s intellect and erudition. Ring composition is a narrative technique of a circuitous approach to storytelling that features intentional digressions. The author uses this technique to weave t

How I got to this book is lost in the mists of my memory, but I must have been intrigued because I ordered it. I had no idea what to expect and was delighted to find a meditation on exile and Homer combined with a personal memoir of the author's life as a writer, a Jew and a son.The stories and digressions are constantly circling back on themselves as the rhyme of events echoes through history. Thankfully, my ignorance of Homer's work did not feel like an obstacle as Mendelsohn's enormous erudit...

A Voice above the BarbarismThe Greeks coined the term barbarism from the way surrounding peoples seemed to be saying nothing but “Bar-bar” when they spoke. But the term also had all the connotations it has today: a lack of culture and no pursuit of a higher way of life.Above the clamor of much of what’s said in our “civil” discourse today, Daniel Mendelsohn has again penned a book that will be worth reading once all the buzzwords and contemporary slogans of today have become so much historical d...

Like much of Mendelsohn’s fine work, this slim book is a combination of close reading, cultural musing and autobiography. His focus is a literary technique called “ring composition” in which “the narrative appears to meander away into a digression … although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end to be a circle.” The locus classicus is the passage in the Odyssey where the old nurse washing the legs of the stranger Odysseus notices a scar he received as a boy, whereupon Hom...

A peerless book-for-the-ages in which a classics scholar describes the tricks of his trade through the lives and fates of his academic as well as filial ancestors. Although stylistically inspired by the Homeric ring composition, the narrative also recalls the fictional universes of Borges and Calvino with one small difference: the historical labyrinth reconstructed in this case is a beautiful illustration of life mimicking art mimicking life.

"Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate" (2020) is an experimental academic work that blends memoir, criticism, classics, and narrative theory. I knew Daniel Mendelsohn from an earlier memoir created from Homer's structure, "An Odyssey. A Father, a Son and an Epic" (2017) which I particularly enjoyed. In this latest work, he has created a kind of successor, performing a greater work of self-criticism and analysis of his previous works, and this idea of succession is immediately appare...

Ultimately, I wanted to like this -- part exploration, part enactment, of Homeric ring composition -- more than I did. Three Rings is distinguished by the same high modernist tendencies I've come to appreciate in the works of Pound and his contemporaries, imaginative writing that cleaves to juxtaposition, subject-rhyme, and Bucky-Fullerian synergy, where a succession of narrative rings makes meaning alternately in interposition and linkage, and unexpected meanings emerge from the friction of ass...

Frankly, I don't know what to make of "Three Rings." I thoroughly enjoyed the bio and exegesis in Daniel Mendelsohn "Odyssey" book, but this collected essay gloss was disjointed and never captured my attention for long. So the ring composition is a clever literary technique that requires skilled planning and execution and can provide insights along the way, and we have three authors who did that, sort of? I was hoping for more of treatise on how to incorporate the ring into your writing or some

I can't credit the revival of the New York Review of Books all to Mr. Mendelsohn. However, about the time I noticed that the Review had regained a lucidity and snap that slipped after Robert Silvers' death, I also realized that Mendelsohn had become 'Editor-at-Large.' I'm not quite sure what that means but Mendelsohn's combination of classical learning and vivid popular approachability might be a critical factor in this return to form.'The Ring' originally was a series of lectures and while engr...

For anyone who loved, as I did, Mendelsohn's My Odyssey, this little book (revised from a lecture at U.Va.) is a gem of a lagniappe.

Right after reading The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million, the first book I’ve ever read by Mendelsohn, I thought (and wrote) how wonderfully he uses ring composition technique for his novels. I noticed a connection between how his grandfather used to tell him stories about his childhood - indeed using ring composition - and how well Daniel himself exploits this technique in order to write his memoirs. The technique traces back to important predecessors, especially for a classicist and a wri...

Daniel Mendelsohn weaves together several of his chief moral and literary preoccupations in this slim idiosyncratic book, which began as a lecture series at the University of Virginia. One is the Holocaust, which Mendelsohn readily acknowledges has continued to haunt, if not oppress him, ever since he wrote the book about the fate of family members in World War II, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. His other preoccupation, which helps him to balance the weight of Holocaust remembrance,

An entertaining book length essay on the literary significance of digressions as they originally appeared in Homer's The Odyssey.Daniel Mendelsohn, a Professor at Bard College, and a writer who frequently appears in the NYRB and New Yorker, is a world renowned expert in Homer. The book took form as a result of personal experiences of family members who survived the Holocaust and a cruise he took with his aging father of the Greek Islands with a focus on Homer's Odysseus.Digressive in nature, Men...

This is not a book for everybody, but it sure is for me. The three "rings" comprising this curious book are really three lectures that Mendelsohn crafted, all based on the notion that some great writers like Homer, Francois Fénelon, Marcel Proust, Erich Auerbach, and W.G. Sebald enrich their narratives by interrupting them with digressions, stories that leap away from the central narrative with their own compact integrity. The idea is that these detouring stories eventually circle back to their

I have to admit to being highly flattered to have been sent this slim but complex volume by dear friends. I took their gesture to mean that I was capable of absorbing its contents, so I set about reading these contributions to a distinguished lecture series at the University of Virginia as if I were, once again, an English major with a couple of philosophy credits. It was the right approach, especially combined with my new regimen of reading for an hour first thing each morning—before the day ta...