David Quint writes:

Without too much anachronism, we can call this world of merchants and the well-to-do a modernising world of commerce: not ours, but an earlier version of it with which we can identify. The Odyssey places it side by side with – sometimes as a foil to, sometimes infiltrating into – the story of its voyaging hero. It measures the distance between a feudal world where it is possible to make money the old-fashioned way, by sacking cities, raiding cattle or through gift exchange, and a world of maritime trade. It also measures the distance between a world of wonders where gods shape the affairs of men and a disenchanted world that human beings make for themselves and is governed by chance: the lucky occasion that can make you a fortune, the corresponding mishap that can leave you shipwrecked. In terms of literary genres and registers, the first of these is the realm of the epic, the second the terrain of the novel, the characteristic genre of Western modernity.

(LRB 25 June 2009)

Oxford | hardback 450 pp. |ISBN: 9780199233328