THREE RINGS: A Tale of Exile Narrative and Fate

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger France's best foreign book of the year.‘Astounding’ Sebastian Barry‘A masterpiece’ Ayad Akhtar‘This little book is ruminative humane and gorgeously precise’Jonathan LethemIn this genre-defying book best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel 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 Three Rings 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 the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature Mimesis in Istanbul.Francois Fenelon the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the OdysseyThe Adventures of Telemachus – a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years – 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 two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders languages and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history art and life.