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.
