7.12.2026 - Epic in Brief

She asks me to summarize the Odyssey. She wants to know the story before the movie comes out. This is reasonable; no one should feel compelled to read this thing. It wasn't even supposed to be a book. It was evening entertainment, filler for jesters to recite in the mix with clanging bronze and earthenware cups filled with awful wine. It was meant to be shouted or sung, and sometimes ignored, background noise like the orchestral lead-in to an old film to give patrons something to listen to while latecomers found their seats. It might make a better movie than a book.

So I tell her, my dad read me the Odyssey when I was five. I slept in the laundry room. Sometimes a pair of pants hanging on the corner of the door looked like a ghost to me. When I told him this he said with kindness that I could always tell him stuff like that. Then he read me the story about Odysseus in the Cyclops's cave and how the monster Polyphemus would pick men up and dash their brains out against the rocks before swallowing their bodies whole.

I picked up a copy translated by some guy named Fagles. It reads briskly. I’m trying to finish it before the Nolan movie comes out. I like his movies and love a few (Dark Knight, Tenet) and I say with admiration that he's insane for trying to adapt this. So much is narrated after the fact, like ol’ Ody is hanging around some banquet hall telling stories about how shitty his trip has been so far, or he’s telling a goddess about what he’s been through even though ostensibly she already knows, being a goddess, and the story generally zigs and zags and meanwhile back at the ranch a bunch of dudes are creeping on his wife and his son and I told this babe I’d give her the rundown on what happens before we go see the movie so let me give that a try: there’s this guy, right? Hero of the Trojan War. No not the sulky one who got himself killed after pulling a bunch of disgraceful hijinks. The guy who basically won the war which really shouldn't have happened in the first place. Isn't that always the way with wars? They seem like such a good idea at the time and then they start and we're all, uh oh, we really didn't think this through and now folks are dying and we're going to have to answer for that.

All you really need to know is that the Greeks aka the Achaean Host were busy for about ten years besieging Troy on the other side of the Aegean Sea which incidentally got its name from my personal favorite myth which has nothing to do with this but let's just say a maze is involved, and the reason they're doing this is a woman, Helen, who was so fetching that when that jerk Paris abducted her or seduced her or tricked her depending on who you ask and brought her back to Troy there was this oath in place which meant everyone in Greece had to help her husband the Spartan king go to war to get her back.

Thus the Iliad, which is mostly about Achilles being a mopey asshole and which ends with Odysseus coming up with this weird plan to fill a gift horse with soldiers and present it to the Trojans who idiotically don't look in its mouth then get drunk and celebrate their victory and fall asleep in the streets so when the horse opens up and all the Greeks pour out it’s no real challenge for them to take the city and retrieve Helen who may have been perfectly happy for all we know. It's worth noting that the Trojan horse thing wasn't added until later which feels like a retcon if you ask me.

Ok anyway that’s the first book. Now Odysseus and his men are trying to sail back to Ithaca where he’s king and his wife and son and old dog are waiting, only he’s pissed off some of the gods by eating their cows and they send him reeling and spilling and sinking all over the Mediterranean, and along the way he loses his crew, some of them to drugs, and then he gets some more crew and there used to be these sketches where a guy played Ozzie Guillen, the silly but likeable White Sox coach, reviewing classic literature and this should be read by him, anyway a bunch of stuff happens like they have to trick this big man-eating Cyclops into letting them go before he eats them all like I mentioned above and there’s this really dramatic scene where the Sirens are singing and luring the men into the water to drown and they all put wax in their ears but Odysseus for no good reason other than showing off his masculinity I guess has them tie him to the mast without putting wax in his ears so he has to listen to their song and it’s agony and it makes him pretty horny which must be embarrassing being tied to the mast like that with everyone watching or maybe that’s what he’s into, and they meet Circe who is a beautiful sorceress and turns all the men into pigs until he convinces her to change them back, and they have to sail between a big rock and a swirly place, and anyway it takes him a while, like ten more years I think, but he finally gets home and finds all these jamokes sleeping in his castle and pawing at his wife and he's in disguise for some reason and he holds an archery contest, I think, and everyone sucks at archery but him then he slaughters them all and everyone lives happily ever after as long as they burn enough sheep to please the gods.