Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the blockbuster event of the season, taking the one of the oldest and still greatest epics of all time - Homer’s Odyssey - and giving it what it always lacked. That is to say: Matt Damon.
And not just Matt Damon, but Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Travis Scott, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton - and the list goes on. But this roll call of Hollywood celebrities are blips in time compared with the multi-millennia celebrity of Odysseus, Circe, Penelope, Athena, the Cyclops and Poseidon, to name just a few of Homer’s heavy hitters.
Join the Secret Life of Books for a deep dive into the wine-dark seas of Homer and the Odyssey as we ask how this mighty tale shapes English literature from Shakespeare to Keats; Toni Morrison to Margaret Atwood. We’ll talk a bit about who Homer was (if anyone at all), how the epic made its way into written form, and what's up with “Chapman’s Homer,” the first English translation.
And of course no Homeric overview is complete without name-checking Tennyson’s and James Joyce’s versions of the story, both called Ulysses, but in almost every other way wildly different.
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