THREE RINGS: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate

A prize winning masterpiece, this little book is ruminative, humane and genre-defying. 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, the book 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 was the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature Mimesis in Istanbul. François Fenelon was the 17th century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, named The Adventures of Telemachus, was a veiled critique of the Sun King. It was the bestselling book in Europe for 100 years and 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 struggles to write his own family saga of the Holocaust and memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father. Haunting tales of oppression and wandering, his book moves to a startling conclusion about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages and centuries. 128pp, paperback.