Romance Book

I was a bit skeptical when I picked up Alberto Manguel's "Biography" on Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. The book clocks in at just over 200 pages, and its focus is meant to show the influence of these great books on the Western world! Well, after finishing it, I'd read anything by this guy. Manguel is incredibly learned, but he wears it lightly, and he writes like a dream. If anything, I'd say he's pleasantly subversive, since the book is probably a great tease, designed to the leave reader wanting to either read (if they haven't done so already) Homer, or re-read him. At the very least, to explore some of the many works by other writers influenced by Homer.

Though Manguel weaves back and forth a bit, he basically starts at the beginning, with Homer himself. Was he a real person? What do we know about him? Or was he a collection of fragments, and Idea himself? There are some hazy facts or stories about a man named Homer that are impossible to verify. But we still don't know much about Shakespeare. (Personally, I believe there was a poet named Homer.) After a Homer of sorts is established, Manguel takes off, in short, quick hitting chapters that discuss Homer's influence on Virgil, the philosophers of the Greek and Roman worlds, the Christian Homer, Homer and Islam, Homer and the Reformation, etc., all the way up to the present time. And the great names roll on by: Pope, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tennyson, Nietzche, Freud, Joyce, Simone Weil. However, one omission surprised me: Christopher Logue, and his current rewriting of the Iliad (War Music, and following volumes). Logue's effort has been a highly praised one (George Steiner is a major fan), and it seemed almost glaring that Logue's ongoing treatment was skipped over by Manguel. But that's a minor quibble. I can't imagine a better introduction to Homer and his great books than Manguel's wonderful "biography."