The first focuses on the figure of Erich Auerbach, the German Jewish philologist who wrote his most famous book, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, while he was living and teaching in Istanbul, having been removed from his position at the University of Marburg in 1936 by the Nazis. Three Rings is divided into three sections.

“He could be so many people,” continues Mendelsohn, “the Spaniard or the Jew, the Muslim or the Greek” exile is also a universal experience shared by people across eras and geographies.Īnd because Mendelsohn is a trained classicist, we begin - as we so often do in his books - with the Greeks, and with an impassioned close reading of text. With slight variations, this sentence appears throughout the rest of the book, Mendelsohn reminding us that the question of who is exiled depends on the particular historical moment, and on where and when we are in the world. All of the text’s essential components are contained in this opening sentence: the anonymity of the exile, the strangeness of a new landscape, and the end of a difficult journey. “A STRANGER ARRIVES in an unknown city after a long voyage.” So begins Three Rings, a slender, dense book that was originally constructed as a series of three public lectures titled A Digression: Narrative Afterlives of The Odyssey, which Daniel Mendelsohn delivered at the University of Virginia in 2019.

An odyssey by daniel mendelsohn