What Homer’s Odyssey can teach us in 2025 – and why Donald Trump won’t be reading it . . .

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Our annual Salon trip to the sun-drenched island of Agistri to study classical literature is always one of the year’s greatest highlights. Each day we wake to a different sunrise. We dip in the sparkling sea, embrace Jane’s heart-led yoga and savour the deliciously fresh and healthy food offered by Rosy’s village. Above all we relish the utter luxury of entering an enduring literary world with a group of bold fellow voyagers, for a week during which our reading is further expanded by Caroline’s illuminating poetic responses and Jane’s skill in realising dramatic possibilities. 

What is different for me this year is the clanging backdrop of global politics, louder than ever, and in particular the destruction of democracy in the United States. Our study of Homer’s Odyssey always reveals profound insights into the world we find ourselves in today: Oxen of the Sun gestures to the degradation of environmental balance, the encounter in Circe can be understood in terms of gender power dynamics seeking resolution, while the absolute struggle of Odysseus to survive and find his way home – not just for his own sake but for the men he leads – will open up our discussion about leadership. What makes a true leader? What does a leader owe those who follow? How does a group respond when leadership can no longer be trusted? Homer strips events back to their bare bones – in the Homeric world there is no interior narration, all happens on the surface and in the moment. 

The other predominant consideration in the Odyssey, and for us in the present day, is that of xenia – the relationship between guest and host. How do we treat the stranger arriving on our shore? How do we want to be treated when we are that stranger? What does this say about our culture, our home, our values? Homer makes us aware of how central this relationship has been to our humanity from the very earliest times of recorded history. 

In past years this rare escape into literature has provided context and perspective for the challenges of the modern world. It has given me renewed strength to oppose inequality and to encourage open and inclusive teaching practice for all. I come away from our Salon study experiences heartened by the many beautiful minds I have been privileged to encounter through shared exploration of these complex texts.

This year, I know it will not be easy to escape the horrors of the world, I will carry my worries with me. I have people in my community who are directly impacted by the destruction in the USA – I know people who have already lost their jobs and others who fear losing them, I know authors whose books have been banned, I know people in humanitarian aid around the world whose work is threatened daily – and I also know that this is just the beginning of direct, negative impact on the lives of so many. And yet, nearly three thousand years after it was first written, Homer’s Odyssey reminds me that with courage and persistence it is possible – eventually – to overcome adversity and return to rebuild one’s home and community.

We still have a few places available on our Odyssey study. If you are interested in the idea of sharing this experience with a group of keen and humane fellow readers and would like to know more, you are very welcome to email us.

Return to The Odyssey

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In interesting news for lovers of The Odyssey, cinema seems to have caught the Homeric bug, with not one but two major films on the way.

In May, Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche will star in The Return. Director Umberto Pasolini tells the story of the final books set in Ithaca, thereby eliminating the need for special effects, monsters and turning his actors into pigs. Given that the glorious stop-motion visual effects produced by Ray Harryhausen for the 1963 epic Jason and the Argonauts made that the definitive visual version for so many, it may be wise to tell the story on screen as a purely human struggle (there is no Athena in the cast list, so there won’t even be an appearance by the goddess).

Meanwhile, Christopher Nolan is also working on a film version of The Odyssey with a release date in 2026. Cast members are being announced as I write, and it will be interesting to see how the director of The Dark Knight, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer tackles the challenges of bringing this foundational epic story to life. 

The idea that there is no one way to experience or connect with The Odyssey is again in my mind as Toby, Jane  and I start to prepare for our fifth trip to the small island of Agistri. Even though this will be our fourth time tackling The Odyssey in this unique setting, I don’t have the feeling of returning to a familiar groove. Each morning on Agistri I walk out to a headland to watch the sunrise, and I have never had the same walk twice: every day there is something new or different that catches my notice. Similarly, our subject may be the same but, as no two groups are alike, the discussion will always be as individual as the colours of the sunrise or the number of alpine swifts that swoop to catch insects as the heat warms the cliffs. 

From ancient times, Homer has been praised for his vividness. As readers we can see, hear and feel every corner of his world. So we have not just the sweep of the narrative and the big themes of honour, hospitality and homecoming, but the texture and details of life – and it’s those details, impossible to absorb all at once, that for me make repeated readings so satisfying.

In the past, some participants have come to the study via the novel Ulysses, seeking a deeper understanding of the origins of James Joyce’s masterpiece. And this idea of The Odyssey as a deep well that has nourished and inspired writers since its beginning is central to our work with the text. I bring with me to the island a series of Odyssey poems written over time, by poets from Sappho to Terrance Hayes who, like other readers of The Odyssey, have found many ways to dip into the source and find something that they can make their own. Sharing these poems with the group opens up the text, bringing it into focus in our daily lives.   

Our study space on Agistri is open to the calm waters of the Saronic Gulf and part of the rhythm of the day is watching the boats arrive and leave from Skala port, every type of vessel from car ferries to sailboats chartered for a day trip to the island. To me they are all beautiful – at least as we watch from a distance – and it’s Tennyson that I recite most often to myself as one of them leaves the dock and glides silently away from us:

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: 

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, 

Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me— 

That ever with a frolic welcome took 

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; 

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; 

Death closes all: but something ere the end, 

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: 

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep 

Moans round with many voices.

I am looking forward to sharing these experiences and more with another group of enthusiastic readers in the warm embrace of Agistri and the Greek sunshine.

Our 2025 Odyssey study on Agistri runs from 28 April to 5 May, there are still places available if you are interested in joining us.

Why read Faulkner now?

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Portrait of William Faulkner by Carl Van Vechten, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“. . . the twilight-coloured smell of honeysuckle . . .”

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Why read Faulkner today? A difficult, old, white, long-dead male writer – one who lied about his military experience, whose mind was ravaged by drink and disappointment – who was also a Nobel laureate, a dreamer, a lover of beauty, a seeker of what shimmers in human relationships and who believed, against the violence and prejudice surrounding him, that human beings can strive for meaning and truth. 

Faulkner peeled back the skin of his life and allowed his art to feed on his exposed self. While it is true that at times he reflects the racial and gender prejudices of his time and cultural space, it is equally true that from the same space he also interrogates racism, misogyny and inequity through his own experience. His writing – sultry, tragic, comic and deeply philosophical – brings the reader utterly into his world and its agonies. But in the midst of the howling and rage, there is always the energy of seeking hope – whether it be in the form of a young woman who escapes her terrible inheritance, the endurance of the statuesque Dilsey, or the howling of the final inheritor of Sutpen’s magnificent dream – we see the human spirit fighting for integrity. 

Now – right now – I feel the need to find means to resist external forces that feel overwhelming. I am talking about political corruption, environmental degradation, disasters of fire and war, wilful ignorance, xenophobic power structures, and feelings of helplessness in the face of these monstrosities. Faulkner and other writers I revere help me to not turn away, reminding me that even in a cataclysm, a single act of bravery or resistance matters.  Language – words, rhythms, lyric content, jagged images – can give me a model for living within an indigestible world. 

William Faulkner’s Address Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature

As originally delivered 10 December, 1950 in Stockholm, Sweden

This is an excerpt—the whole speech is worth reading.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear, so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man, young woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he lives under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he releases – relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will still endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

We are currently offering studies of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!

Why read Ulysses?

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Top of many ‘best novel’ lists, Ulysses also heads countless lists of great novels abandoned or never read – even by accomplished readers and writers. What is it about this huge book that makes it so daunting, so hard, and so valuable? Why read it at all?

The book offers an ever-widening perspective. From an intimate view of one relatively unremarkable man’s walk around Dublin on a summer’s day, the linguistic journey ripples outward to encompass a dazzling range of quirky local characters, visions of the Far East, critiques of Empire, references to Irish politics, ancient and modern philosophical theories, gender dynamics, operas, innards, sexual hallucinations, cross-dressing, dogs (alive and dead), cats, the history of food, lemon soap that sings, a treatise on water, death rituals and the decomposition of the human body, pornographic books, Shakespearean theories . . . Ulysses is packed with rich intellectual enquiry, the compelling rhythms of a hungry mind exploring the wonders of the world.

Then there is the writing itself. To grapple with the words and linguistic pyrotechnics of James Joyce – to enter into his exploration of the body, mind and street-life, to sit in awe of his allusions, musicality, interweaving structures and thematic developments – is to expand the possibilities of the written word. To do this with a diverse group of other curious readers who are sharing the struggle and process of discovery allows each participant to enrich their own understanding many times over. Together we laugh, we express our frustrations, we query meaning and purpose, and we discover great depth in the language and vision of an extraordinary writer.

Our next Ulysses studies – two options: 11.30 am – 1.30 pm or 5.30 – 7.30 pm (UK time) – begin on Tuesday 21 January. If you are tempted to sign up we have a very few places remaining and you are welcome to join the first meeting without charge or obligation to continue. Please email litsalon@gmail.com using the subject line ‘Ulysses 2025’ if you would like to try a session before you buy!

Ten good reasons to read Ulysses . . .

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Six months seems like a long commitment and reading this 933 page masterpiece can be a daunting prospect. There will be literary, historical and classical references you may not know (yet), but I promise you it will be worth it! Here are ten reasons why:

  • Ulysses teaches you to be a better reader.
  • Reading Ulysses helps you to understand your own interior thoughts and language.
  • Ulysses is frighteningly pertinent to today’s climate of xenophobia and tyranny.
  • Ulysses is funny.
  • Ulysses features a dancing, singing bar of soap.
  • Everyone who reads Ulysses finds references, allusions and images that resonate.
  • Once banned for obscenity, Ulysses is up-close and personal to the body.
  • The language of Ulysses can be breathtakingly beautiful: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit . . .”
  • The vivid and seductive response to ignorance and injustice in Ulysses will inspire you.
  • Ulysses is the story of one man, but a woman (Molly) gets the last word!

What past Ulysses readers in the Salon have said:

“I must thank you for a most wonderful study of Ulysses. I couldn’t imagine that I would actually make it through.  Occasionally I felt inadequate, but always eager and always willing to reach. And what a reward in the end: to have read a brilliant novel, and to have made a connection with a group of fellow voyagers that I cannot praise enough. How fortunate we have all been. It is never really over though is it? Bloom will be with me forever, pulling me back to Dublin and the streets therein.”

“Those of us who have done Proust and Ulysses with Toby are longing for her to take us on another read . . . We all love the long read.”

For more on this join my lecture and discussion Why Read Ulysses? (Tuesday 24 November on Zoom), the cost is redeemable against our next Ulysses study starting in January 2025.

Reflections on this day, and those to come

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Photo by Mike Cox on Unsplash

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.

Stanley Kunitz, The Testing Tree

I knew in these last few weeks, that I was refusing to even countenance a Trump election victory. 

Now that it seems clear that is what will happen, I am shattered. 

My husband and daughter obsess on a very difficult puzzle that is a map of the world. 

I sit with my Spaniel who demands attention and find a clean and brief joy in rubbing his belly. 

My disbelief in what has transpired in the United States feels privileged and ignorant. I know people from countries who have watched with horror as their country turns to tyranny and fascism. And they keep finding reasons to hope, to fight. 

I want to say to my daughter ‘I am so sorry’. How can I apologise for this country of mine that I no longer understand? How can I apologise for who we are?

The thought that really cleaves – in both senses of the word – is all those who, with shining hope, worked for Harris-Walz and all the positive candidates across the USA. The candidates who spoke out against greed, against misogyny, against racism and hate in all its forms. How do you go on when you have put your heart and soul into what is right and you lose? So many people joined together to push against the grotesqueness of the MAGA crowd—what happens to their activism, their commitment to turning the USA towards progress and compassion? 

So this is what I will try to nurture in the coming days: the energy to keep fighting, the capacity to believe in a different vision of the future than the one just voted into power. Broken, battered and despondent, I will join with communities across the world to advocate for a better world against this horrific monster of hate. This man represents our worst instincts—now we must nurture our best. I am also aware that I speak from the luxury of living outside of the USA. I am familiar with the writings of some exiles whose love of their old, broken country fired their imagination. May we all find a voice to express our pain, outrage and, ultimately, hope. 

Can’t read? Won’t read?

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Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

News from the US last month about growing numbers of students at elite universities who can’t read whole books (revealed in The Atlantic magazine) was immediately echoed by UK academics. Earlier in the year a report from UK charity the Reading Agency (whose mission is to empower people of all ages to read) found that half of UK adults don’t regularly read and almost one in four young people aged 16-24 say they’ve never been readers.

While some people find the prospect of reading literature simply overwhelming, others find it difficult to overcome barriers including lack of time, as well as competing distractions from electronic devices and bite-size chunks of instant entertainment. Fortunately, there are also many who remain convinced that reading is a unique way of expanding our understanding of the world and our empathy for others. Sharing the experience of individuals in different times, places and circumstances through reading expands our consciousness, our sensitivity and our imagination in unique ways.

We continue to offer opportunities to be part of a community reading wonderful books from authors writing originally in a range of languages, from places real and imagined, and covering milliennia from the ancient world to the present day. Already on the menu for 2025 are new studies of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses starting in January. Also booking now are Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, not to mention travel studies reading Homer’s Iliad and Euripides’ Trojan Women in Greece, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick on board a traditional sailing ship. Much more – poetry, drama, philosophy, history of art – will follow soon. Join us if you can!

If you are thinking about joining our Proust or James Joyce studies check out these lectures and discussions led by Toby Brothers and coming up in the next few weeks (the cost is redeemable against the study price if you decide to sign up):

Tuesday 26 November, Why read Ulysses?

Tuesday 3 December, Why read Proust in 2025?

You can also read Toby’s thoughts on ‘How we Read‘ for more about what the Salon experience offers.

‘Playing’ with Shakespeare – the precedents for curating Hamlet . . .

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When Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet—Shakespeare’s longest and most deeply philosophical play—opened in 1948, the critics were almost without exception entranced. The exhilarating production won four Oscars, including Best Actor and Best Picture. Olivier’s celebrated version also paved the way for other filmmakers to significantly cut the text, an action already commonly undertaken in stage performances, but one which later critics were to lament. Among other cuts, Olivier and his co-editor, Alan Dent, struck Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the text along with Fortinbras’ last entrance and at least two of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquies. Had Olivier massacred the Bard?

Kenneth Branagh may have thought so. His 1996 production showcased nearly the entire script, resulting in a film with a running time of 4 hours and 2 minutes, nearly 1.5 hours longer than Olivier’s production half a century before, which came in at a slick 153 minutes. (It may or may not be significant that Branagh’s version garnered zero Academy Awards, though it did receive four nominations that did not include either Best Actor or Best Picture, but did include Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay).

Counter-critics to those lamenting Olivier’s cuts have praised the 1948 production for being, for example, ‘thrillingly intelligent and moving’ (Rafferty, 2000, para. 3), also referring to the interpretation as having been sensitively reduced to its ‘largest, most mysterious, and most intractable theme’ (Rafferty, 2000, para. 4): morality.

The London Literary Salon’s latest study of Hamlet also examines a carefully curated script. Our study will focus on 2,600 of Hamlet’s 4,167 lines. We will be working from the 1604 quarto, which was printed from a manuscript believed to be Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’ (his rough drafts). Our own ‘version’ is more exhaustive than Olivier’s. It includes all the play’s subplots—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras, and Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia—as well as all of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Together, we will dive into the heart of the text, considering not only its philosophical core but also its most spectral and cinematic aspects: the paranormal, incest, adultery, murder, madness, and above all, revenge.

References: Rafferty, T. (2000). Hamlet. The Criterion Collection.

Join Dr. Julie Sutherland on six successive Wednesday evenings (5.00-7.00 pm GMT) beginning on 8 January 2025 to discuss a play that has enthralled audiences for more than four centuries.

Killing humour? Reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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Photo by Nikki Fraunhofer shows architectural detail from St Stephen Walbrook church, London EC4

Merricat, Constance and Uncle Julian Blackwood live in a grand, eccentric house which they call the Castle. The rambling mansion itself forms a powerful character within the novel and sits on the edge of an unnamed American village. Within the Blackwood wire fence, eighteen-year-old Merricat roves the estate, burying magical charms to conjure an illusion of safety. Twice a week however, she must venture out into a world of petty, spiteful villagers. They stare and whisper, whilst local children hound Merricat, chanting a mocking rhyme about her older sister.

When Jackson introduces us to the Castle any ordinary writer would buckle under the weight of laboured tropes about mayhem, magic and madness. Yet from the start, Jackson’s spare, taut prose signals this is no mere work of folkloric, gothic froth. Her narrative is pierced by acute observations about the kinds of small-town prejudices which leave the Blackwoods marginalised and marooned at the edge of their community. She weaves a sardonic thread of social commentary throughout the story, but her genius lies in one skill above all others: the way she touches, oh so lightly, on the fact that one of the sisters is a poisoner.

Constance was once tried and acquitted for poisoning her family, but years later she remains imprisoned by choice, never leaving the grounds of the Blackwood home. Defined by a world which prizes a clean house and well-cooked food as the paradigm of feminine virtue, Constance produces a stream of jewel-like preserves with an almost magical ease. As readers, we are left to wonder why nearly everyone in the Blackwood family died after sharing the meal which she cooked. Merricat, our narrator seems to neither know nor care, but when Cousin Charles arrives hoping to charm Constance and her fortune away with him, the question gains new urgency.

Jackson’s book is rich with astute perceptions about the murky depths below our paper-thin layers of civilisation. Her novella defies classification, fitting none of the conventional murder-mystery, feminist polemic, or teenage ‘coming of age’ categories. Whilst Castle has resonances with Jackson’s short-story The Lottery, here Jackson fleshes out the end results of community-enforced rules of ‘normality’ and their effects on social order. Set in 1950s America, the novella provides a savage commentary on the Cold War paranoia, as well as rigidly enforced, gender-specific expectations of the times. It is a tale of many kinds of poisoning and yet the book is also strangely funny. Were Jackson alive today, one has to wonder whether her intelligent, incisive humour would be published. Could it be that our contemporary ‘norms of civilisation’ are now too poisonous to be funny?

You can join Nikki Fraunhofer to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle over three two hour meetings on Zoom, Thursday 29 August, 5 & 12 September, 5.00-7.00pm UK time.

Bloomsday 2024!

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“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed . . .”

For many of us the opening lines of Ulysses, which usher in the one day (16 June 1904) on which Leopold Bloom takes his long perambulation around Dublin, are so familiar they scarcely need repeating. And yet, there are always people who have yet to read – or re-read – James Joyce’s monumental work of art. For anyone contemplating this journey through time we are planning a new Ulysses study starting early in 2025, details will be announced here on the website and in our newsletter soon (please make sure you are subscribed).

We have some incredible readers who are just in the process of completing Ulysses with Toby, after six months of what she describes as: “mad reading, struggling for understanding, deep probing of textual complexity, gender roles and identifications, the awful weight of history, antisemitism, the haunting of grief and the meaning of the lemon soap – a lovely group of readers have triumphed in their work with Joyce – their final meeting happens this week.” 

Unusually, we are not celebrating Bloomsday formally this year, BUT the gallery above is a reminder of Bloomsday and other Joyce-related events the Salon has enjoyed in recent years (and there will be more in the future). Meanwhile, here are a few things going on if you are keen to find a last minute opportunity:

  • The London Balloonatics, who can normally be found on Bloomsday re-enacting Bloom’s Dublin walk on the streets of London, are instead walking in Dublin this year (find them on the Bloomsday Festival website link below) but offer this audio for those of us who are not in Dublin with them!
  • Our friends at Audrey are offering a ‘listen-along’ Ulysses opportunity.
  • For anyone in Dublin the James Joyce Centre’s annual Bloomsday Festival has lots going on this weekend, as does the Derry-based YES Festival celebrating female creativity with a focus on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.
  • In London the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith is offering a play Norah & Jim and an art exhibition based on Ulysses.

Happy Bloomsday!

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