WRB—July 22, 2026
“sensual and lyrical”
Yet come it will, the day decreed by fates—
How my heart trembles while my tongue relates!—
The day when thou, the WRB! must bend,
And see thy warriors fall, thy glories end.
Links:
Reviews:
Reviews of The Odyssey (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2026):
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Daniel Mendelsohn:
Nor can this Odysseus charm the Phaeacians with his seductive talk and beguiling storytelling, because Nolan has eliminated the Phaeacian episode altogether—a real loss, given that long episode’s enchanting portrayal of the feisty teenage princess Nausicaa, who discovers the shipwrecked hero and saves him, and of her adoring parents. This Odysseus does not break down in tears at the apparition of his mother in Hades, because that tender moment, too, has been excised, along with the most crucial encounter he has in the Underworld. The ghost of Achilles, who had given up long life in return for eternal glory, tells his old comrade that he would rather be alive, the lowest servant of a poor man, than king of all the dead: a ringing endorsement of the Odyssey’s hero, who stops at nothing to survive.
In The New Republic, Katie Kadue:
It takes quite a few twists and turns of the basic plot to arrive at this framing. Something has indeed gone wrong with xenia, the Greek term for the custom of hospitality often translated as “guest-friendship,” in the world of the Odyssey. During her husband’s long absence, suitors have descended on Penelope and are overstaying their welcome, and the godless monsters Odysseus’ men encounter are not gracious hosts. But if there’s an original sin of xenia-violation in this story, it’s not the Trojan horse. Ten years earlier, the Trojan prince Paris started the war by absconding from the house of the Greek king Menelaus, where he was a guest, with his wife Helen, who may or may not have gone willingly. In Nolan’s version, it’s made clear that Helen’s abduction was used as a cynical pretext for Menelaus’ brother, Agamemnon, to gain control of the region’s trading routes, a plot Odysseus regrets abetting. A similar imperialist motive with obvious contemporary relevance is attributed to Agamemnon in Troy (2004), the loose Bush-era adaptation of the Iliad; some stories really are timeless.
On his Substack, Adam Roberts :
There’s another regard in which Nolan departs from Homer’s characterization of Odysseus. He frames his movie as a grand and epic love-story between Penelope and her husband—separated by his sense of duty, his obedience to the Greek king, and thereafter by war, happenstance and fate. Hence Nolan’s addition of the Tennysonian coda in which Odysseus, having come home, immediately departs to the west, with Penelope, so the two of them can enjoy their happy-ever-after together, whilst presumably the Sea People ransack Greece behind them. In this respect Nolan has a problem: because in Homer Odysseus spends seven years bonking Calypso on her island. To get round this Nolan combines the lotos-eater episode with the Calypso episode: to excuse his hero for his adultery. So traumatized has PTSD’d and shipwrecked Odysseus become that Calypso feeds him the lotos flower to opiate his mind. Accordingly he doesn’t remember that he even has a wife, or that he had a crew. After seven years Calypso, for reasons that the movie doesn’t divulge, decides to wean him off the magic flower so that his memories can return, and even advises him on how to get home—by surrendering himself to Poseidon’s wrath, lying on his back on a flimsy raft and letting the ocean overwhelm him. This is contrivance on Nolan’s part, to absolve his hero. It’s one thing for a man to be grief-struck by the things he did as a soldier; it would be another to be guilty for cheating on wifey.
In Engelsberg Ideas, Armand D’Angour:
The greatest of the poem’s recognition scenes, moreover, is absent. In the penultimate book of the Odyssey Penelope, still unsure of the hero’s identity, tests him by asking him to move their marriage bed. He falls for her ruse—finally, his cunning is overpowered by hers—and expostulates that it can’t be moved, as she well knows, because it was carved from a huge tree trunk rooted in the earth. With greater realism if less pathos, Nolan has Penelope recognize Odysseus after he—who else?—has destroyed the suitors with the bow he alone was able to string. The taut string emits a loud and ominous musical twang when he plucks it, rather than the evocative “sound of the swallow” that Homer speaks about to affirm the idea of a return home.
[Samuel Butler, in his The Authoress of the Odyssey, says:
Either sex, in fact, can caricature the other delightfully, and certainly no writer has ever shown more completely than the writer of the Odyssey has done that, next to the glorification of woman, she considers man’s little ways and weaknesses to be the fittest theme on which her genius can be displayed.
Nolan has thrown out the glorification of woman; he has gone further and thrown out the interest in women. As Mendelsohn says in the passage excerpted above, Nausicaa is gone, and, as he says elsewhere in his review, Calypso’s speech denouncing the sexual double standard is gone. The dynamic in Book 4 where Helen introduces new ideas to the conversation and Menelaus immediately agrees with them, showing where the balance of power in that relationship lies, is gone. (I would even venture to add that the hanging of the unfaithful maidservants is gone; I suspect most male authors would have considered the matter resolved with the deaths of the suitors.) Instead, Nolan presents a version of #feminism so over-the-top that, as a friend of mine put it to me, it circles back to misogynist parody. Helen has been physically abused (scars cover one side of her face) and copes with her powerlessness by screaming that Agamemnon had it coming. Circe gives a thudding speech explaining that she has turned Odysseus’ men into pigs because they are pigs. Calypso is a therapist who just wants to help Odysseus heal from his trauma. Not even Penelope is immune; she yells at Telemachus that she has actually been ruling Ithaca for a decade, and people refuse to accept it because she is a woman—not that we see her do any ruling. We are very far away from the simile of Book 23 that appears at the start to be about Odysseus but is actually about Penelope:
And as sad men at sea when shore is nigh,
Which long their hearts have wish’d, their ship quite lost
By Neptune’s rigour, and they vex’d and tost
’Twixt winds and black waves, swimming for their lives,
A few escap’d, and that few that survives,
All drench’d in foam and brine, crawl up to land,
With joy as much as they did worlds command;
So dear to this wife was her husband’s sight,
(Chapman’s translation.) Nobody is going to write The Directress of The Odyssey.
Man’s little ways and weaknesses are gone, too. There is no Elpenor to fall off a roof while drunk, and Matt Damon’s Odysseus is far too self-serious to make a joke about Elpenor beating him to Hades despite Odysseus having a boat. He’s also far too self-serious for the joke about his name being Nobody. Even if Penelope had introduced the idea of moving the bed, this Odysseus would never respond by furiously insisting that it could not be moved. (“Man’s little ways and weaknesses”: Odysseus keeps his cool until his wife belittles his sideline in carpentry, requiring him to respond with lengthy praise of his own taste and technique.) In adapting the fall of Troy from the Aeneid, Nolan apparently picked up the idea that his hero shouldn’t do anything funny. He definitely picked up the idea from the Aeneid that his hero should spend some time during the sack of Troy wandering around, watching the Achaeans commit various sacrileges and atrocities, and feeling bad. What this has to do with Odysseus I don’t know; what it has to do with the protagonists of Nolan movies I do.
As various commentators have observed, Nolan’s Odyssey is his Oppenheimer (2023) but with the Trojan horse as the Bronze Age equivalent of nuclear weapons. In The Odyssey Nolan forgot what he apparently knew there, though: that to feel guilty about ending the world demands something like narcissism. When Oppenheimer quoted “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” he was, if not identifying himself with Krishna, at least associating himself and his actions with a borrowed divinity—something you only do if you have a very high opinion of yourself. Other characters in the film point out that Oppenheimer’s hand-wringing is inextricable from how important he thinks he is. This insight is absent from Nolan’s Odyssey. Odysseus says to Penelope that their story will be told and retold—something he attributes to a post-literate future, but it is one thing to say that the return to an oral culture will involve new traditions of storytelling, and another to say that the stories will be about you.
The refusal to think this through is part of a broader incuriosity about storytelling. The previously-mentioned exclusion of the Phaeacians means that Odysseus never tells any stories; instead, the movie introduces that material as memories he rediscovers through Calypso’s therapy. Any sense of Odysseus as a storyteller, the sort of person who tells stories, why he tells stories, what he gets out of it, is absent. Also absent is him responding to hearing his own story told:
And as a lady mourns her sole-lov’d lord,
That fall’n before his city by the sword,
Fighting to rescue from a cruel fate
His town and children, and in dead estate
Yet panting seeing him, wraps him in her arms,
Weeps, shrieks, and pours her health into his arms,
Lies on him, striving to become his shield
From foes that still assail him, spears impell’d
Through back and shoulders, by whose points embrued,
They raise and lead him into servitude,
Labour, and languor; for all which the dame
Eats down her cheeks with tears, and feeds life’s flame
With miserable suff’rance; so this king
Of tear-swet anguish op’d a boundless spring;
(Chapman again.) Cut this and you don’t have to figure out what sort of story could produce such a response, or why. There’s not really a place for storytelling in Nolan’s relentlessly grim world anyway. Homer, as Mark Van Doren said, is a world; Virgil is not a style, but Nolan’s film is. —Steve]
In The New Yorker, Richard Brody reviews Éric Rohmer’s novel (Élisabeth, 1947, translated from the French by Aaron Kerner, July 7) [An Upcoming book in WRB—July 1, 2026.]:
The cinema offers in a glance what it takes the narrator a page of description to capture, and then offers still more. The sheer fact of filming fills a frame, even one composed with quasi-documentary plainness, with a plethora of details of narrative, expressive, aesthetic, intellectual, and historical import. But Rohmer was right to put an asterisk on his cinematic classicism: it doesn’t bring to mind the familiar and canonical manner of classic Hollywood or its leading auteurs (for whom he had, as a critic, been a discerning advocate). His self-consciousness about the power of movies—their inherent and instant richness of description, their automatic profuse multiplicity—raised movies to the level of high art by way of a disarming simplicity, without emphatic visual rhetoric, spectacular effects, or theatrical grandiosity. With movies, Rohmer achieved clarity along with complexity, dispelling the Post-Impressionist blurring of lines and the modernist veiling of figures that marked the difficulty, however sublime, of Élisabeth.
But, far from repudiating the subjects and themes of Élisabeth, Rohmer pursued his directorial career by extending and deepening them. Most of his films have a master plot—the rejection of false loves, however tempting, in anticipation of one true love—which is to say that they’re films of faith and fate, the conversion of accidents into destinies. They’re also films of refusal, rejection, self-denial, and frustration. (These themes mirror his own Catholic observance and, for that matter, his political conservatism.) In lieu of the finely variegated texture of his intricate prose, Rohmer’s films offer transparent but reflective surfaces that are as taut as they are thin, and which are pressurized by passion, stretched tight by these conflicts; they strain against the pent-up force of unsatisfied desire and threaten to burst.
[That’s just how it is. —Steve]
In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, Jonathan Coe reviews a book about Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann (Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema, by Steven C. Smith, 2025):
Frappat insists that Hitchcock has crossed a line, that his real-life romantic obsession with his leading lady has blurred the distinction between film and real life and it’s the actress herself who is now being subjected to violence. Writing his sleeve notes for The Great Movie Thrillers, Herrmann, trying to put a more positive spin on his former collaborator’s emotional life, insisted that “most people think of Hitchcock as a master of mystery and suspense. Although this is fundamentally true, he is also a great romantic director, his films allowing enormous scope for sensual and lyrical musical treatment.” But what happens when these “romantic” feelings become impossible to control, and are directed towards someone who is never going to return them? That’s the point at which they may curdle into violence, and it was this mutation that Herrmann was able to capture so well, and express so brilliantly, in his scores for Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960) and Marnie (1964). Perhaps, in the end, that was why Hitchcock broke with him: perhaps he couldn’t forgive Herrmann for being the man who knew too much, and understood him too well.
[“Yeah, boss, got this score for your movie about how you treat your actresses, don’t ask me why it sounds like Tristan und Isolde. No reason.” —Steve]
N.B.:
Writers are, and have been, in Syracuse. [The one in New York, although Plato was in the one in Sicily. Delmore Schwartz, apparently, doesn’t rate a mention. I have rectified this oversight by the Times by linking to Lou Reed’s foreword to a collection of his work here and with the Poem below. —Steve]
William S. Burroughs and Maya scholarship.
Poem:
“Baudelaire” by Delmore Schwartz
When I fall asleep, and even during sleep, I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial, Having no relation to my affairs. Dear Mother, is any time left to us In which to be happy? My debts are immense. My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment. I know nothing. I cannot know anything. I have lost the ability to make an effort. But now as before my love for you increases. You are always armed to stone me, always: It is true. It dates from childhood. For the first time in my long life I am almost happy. The book, almost finished, Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust. Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me. Satan glides before me, saying sweetly: “Rest for a day! You can rest and play today. Tonight you will work.” When night comes, My mind, terrified by the arrears, Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence, Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.” Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself With the same resolution, the same weakness. I am sick of this life of furnished rooms. I am sick of having colds and headaches: You know my strange life. Every day brings Its quota of wrath. You little know A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems, The most fatiguing of occupations. I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me. I write from a café near the post office, Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes, The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write “A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write “A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart? Although it costs you countless agony, Although you cannot believe it necessary, And doubt that the sum is accurate, Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.
[This is what it is like to be the Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books. Please subscribe for at least three weeks. —Steve]
Upcoming books:
New Directions | July 28
Five: Novels
by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, with a contribution by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer
From the publisher: Five, selected from over 100 untranslated novels and stories by “the Duchamp of Latin America” (Natasha Wimmer), brings together—each an astonishing work—Margarita: A Memory, The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, Princess Springtime, and The Hormone Pill. Following a cast of dreamlike characters including cyber nuns, a young princess making ends meet as a hack translator, a newspaper vendor, and General Winter and his sadistic sidekick, the Little Christmas Tree, Five shows the many facets of Aira’s master mind as he turns expectations inside-out and gleefully explodes genre conventions.
Five is a must-have for Aira’s legion of devoted fans around the world and a fine introduction to the as-yet uninitiated. A satisfyingly hefty installment from this “exquisite miniaturist” (WSJ) and writer whose “cubist eye sees from every angle” (NYT); because “once you start reading Aira, you don’t want to stop” (Roberto Bolaño).
[We linked to an essay adapted from the introduction in WRB—July 15, 2026.]
Also out Tuesday:
Knopf: Beginning Middle End: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli
What we’re reading:
Steve finished The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy. [I stand by my commentary last week that it reads like “Hardy does Emily Brontë.” The inhuman landscape (the heath, in Hardy’s case) is almost as much a character as any of the human beings in the book. The aspects of Wuthering Heights that would not have interested Hardy are jettisoned by the decision to combine Heathcliff and Catherine into one character, Eustacia Vye. Like Heathcliff, she has an exotic ancestry (her father was Greek) that makes her an oddity in rural England; like Catherine, she has an inexhaustible desire for the finer things in life that leads her into a marriage she almost immediately regrets. What Hardy makes of the supernatural elements in Wuthering Heights is clear from his choice of who believes in such things—only the dullest, most fearful, and most ignorant of the country people. Having disposed of that, he can get to the elements of sociological interest in such a setup. Here he moves beyond mere imitation of Emily Brontë; after all, in Wuthering Heights society does not exist.
The extent to which any Hardy novel succeeds comes back to one question: do the characters’ misfortunes feel like they emerge out of the world as it is, or do they feel imposed upon it by the author? Hardy’s characters, after all, find themselves in the situation he wishes for in “Hap”:
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
Whether it would have consoled them to know that Thomas Hardy willed and meted them the tears they shed, I don’t know. The Return of the Native is one of his more successful novels in this regard; hasty and poor marriages are enough to drive the action. —Steve]
Critical notes:
Victoria Moul on what to read about Homer:
To stay with unexpected perspectives, Silk writes briefly but very helpfully about Homer and jazz (jazz being, as he puts it, “the only developed improvisatory art that is native to the modern Western world”). This analogy is taken up at slightly greater length in the final part of Chiara Bozzone’s Homer’s Living Language (2024), which is undoubtedly the best new book I’ve read about Homer for several years (and, I see, is now out in paperback). She sets out to answer the question of how, given all we know about the formulaic nature of much of Homer’s language, we can “reconcile all of this mechanicity with Homer’s standing as the first great poet in the Western tradition?” How can you be formulaic and creative? This is an old question in the study of Homer but Bozzone both presents the issue with wonderful clarity and provides multiple fresh perspectives, drawing on modern corpus linguistics as well as classical philology. She is particularly excellent on formularity as a feature of language in general.
[I think we can all agree that Homer, whoever Homer was, would have loved “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T. S. Eliot. —Steve]