Publishers Weekly
05/25/2020
Bringing together memoir, history, and literary analysis, critic Mendelsohn (An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic) delivers a fine study of digression, exile, and circularity. Mendelsohn approaches his themes primarily through the lens of Homer’s The Odyssey, in terms of its story line of a long-delayed arrival home, and of Homer’s narrative technique of “ring composition,” in which flashbacks and digressions are layered “in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls.” He explains how this technique led him to a breakthrough with his previous book, and illustrates the technique here with digressions into the lives and work of other authors. These include German scholar Erich Auerbach, who wrote his masterpiece of literary analysis, Mimesis, which includes a chapter on ring composition, while fleeing Nazism; and 17th-century author François Fénelon, whose Odyssey adaptation The Adventures of Telemachus won him fame but also, thanks to its veiled criticisms of King Louis XIV, the loss of his post as royal tutor at Versailles. Mendelsohn’s talent with descriptive detail brings his work alive, such as repeated descriptions of Auerbach, while exiled in Istanbul, gazing through a palace window over the turquoise Sea of Marmara. Mendelsohn never fails to entertain as he takes the reader across thousands of years’ worth of literature and lives. (Aug.)
Town & Country
Memoirist and critic (and TC contributor) Daniel Mendelsohn takes an erudite approach to the writer's dilemma in this new book, which examines the lives and work of three of history's greatest authors as well as Mendelsohn's own experience with a life of letters.
Vertigo - Terry Pitts
Mendelsohn is a natural story-teller and he has managed to turn a multi-century saga of literary criticism and history into an immensely entertaining, readable, and short(!) book..if only more literary criticism (and scholarship, in general) were delivered this way, it would have a much greater audience and impact... Three Rings is a book you must read for yourself, to witness Mendelsohn as he unravels and lays bare the connections between Homer, Auerbach, Fénélon, Sebald, and others. In a way, it’s ironic that Mendelsohn relates so intimately with those who believe in the "irretrievability of the past," because for him the stories of the past are vital to understanding the present. What he transmits so magically in Three Rings is his infectious passion for learning and sharing with others.
From the Publisher
Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, wit—with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet, Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles. Three Rings is a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art.
Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings is erudition, essayism, and memoir, made to dance together like a visible clockworks—or literary scholarship such as Ricky Jay might have practiced it onstage. This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise.
An astounding Borgesian document of clarity and brilliance. A book about telling stories that wanders down the seeming two roads of the Hebrew tradition and the classical, which, like Proust’s two ways, might turn out to be one way after all. Three Rings has the keeled force of a long poem.
Three Rings is a marvel, confirming Mendelsohn's position as one of the most important and original American writers of our time. Mendelsohn does something more commonly found in the most ingenious writers of fiction; his thought-provoking examination of the reworking of stories of wandering and exile, beginning with Homer, ending with Sebald, makes this exceptional work indispensable at a time when it is no longer possible to say "It couldn't happen here, now, again."
The National Review of Books ("Hot Books of the Week")
In his supple, slender book Mendelsohn links three exiled writers... [he] ingeniously turns his straying into the end of the circle, the point from which it had strayed. More than a master class in literary analysis, Three Rings is Mendelsohn’s distinctive, genre-defying inspiration."
Literary Hub
This essay ought to become a beloved handbook for writing Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm was in its time.... [Mendelsohn] performs [the ring method] with a piece of fabulist writing which is a thrilling new mode in a career made of dramatic shifts in register, from fire breathing reviewer to meditative memoirist on desire (The Elusive Embrace, to mournful Sebaldian archivist in the face of the Holocaust (The Lost).... The ring structure allows him to be all things at once. The way this book feels so expansive in a space so small, you don’t even have to ask if the ring structure applies to things other than writing.
The Jewish Book Council Review
This slim volume swirls with Daniel Mendelsohn’s sublime reflections on history, architecture, religion, theater, literature, scholarship, and on his own life. To read it is like spending a few hours with a brilliant, captivating conversationalist whose ardor for his subjects is contagious. It’s an intellectual adventure, and a brilliant achievement.
World Literature Today
[A] unique book... Mendelsohn holds firm to his narrative optimism as this artful book—full of its own digressions, peripheries, and doubts—wends its way to its own moving conclusion.
Times Literary Supplement
Spectacular... The reader feels the flow of a strong narrative, trusts the author’s seafaring skills and embarks on a brilliant journey.... Three Rings is a glorious celebration of multiplicity, diversity, journeys, transformations and our commonhumanity.
ARGO
Mendelsohn’s Three Rings not only provides a tale of exile, narrative and fate with respect to Auerbach, but also in terms of himself. Auerbach proves a vehicle for Mendelsohn, like a lost Homeric hero, to aid his journey home: in his work and, certainly, in this book.
Los Angeles Review of Books
[A] slender, dense book... Mendelsohn offers a powerful observation: that our notion of the real might be shaped by the era in which we find ourselves.
Ayad Akhtar
Contained in the interwoven circles of this slim, labyrinthine book is a vision that encompasses the world. Part dirge, part memoir, part exegesis, all rhapsody — Mendelsohn's anatomy of literature's subtlest pleasures is itself that subtlest of literary pleasures: a masterpiece.
New York Times Book Review
[E}xquisite... Three Rings digresses from its digressions, whirling with elegiac elegance from the 'Odyssey,' which itself veers away from the main tale only to wind home again... Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back to.
Livres Hebdo (France)
In book after book, he confirms his status on the cultural scene as the successor of the late lamented George Steiner.
Wall Street Journal
As always, the author’s voice blends authority with considerable warmth and charm, luring readers into his complex intellectual enthusiasms. Mr. Mendelsohn has honed a prose style that is nuanced yet clear, without a hint of pedantry, and one is always glad to learn what he has to teach.... Three Rings, a short but profoundly moving work, clings with tenacity to a belief in the regenerative power of literature.
Jonathan Lethem
Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings is erudition, essayism, and memoir, made to dance together like a visible clockworks—or literary scholarship such as Ricky Jay might have practiced it onstage. This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise.
Joyce Carol Oates
Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, wit—with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet, Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles. Three Rings is a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art.
Helen DeWitt
Three Rings is a marvel, confirming Mendelsohn's position as one of the most important and original American writers of our time. Mendelsohn does something more commonly found in the most ingenious writers of fiction; his thought-provoking examination of the reworking of stories of wandering and exile, beginning with Homer, ending with Sebald, makes this exceptional work indispensable at a time when it is no longer possible to say "It couldn't happen here, now, again."
Sebastian Barry
An astounding Borgesian document of clarity and brilliance. A book about telling stories that wanders down the seeming two roads of the Hebrew tradition and the classical, which, like Proust’s two ways, might turn out to be one way after all. Three Rings has the keeled force of a long poem.
Town & Country
Memoirist and critic (and T&C contributor) Daniel Mendelsohn takes an erudite approach to the writer's dilemma in this new book, which examines the lives and work of three of history's greatest authors as well as Mendelsohn's own experience with a life of letters.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-04-30
A father’s death inspires a son’s literary voyage.
If Mendelsohn’s previously acclaimed books The Lost (2013), a personal memoir about the Holocaust, andAn Odyssey (2017), about his father’s joyous discovery of Homer’s book and death, are two rings, this is the third and final ring that interweaves and interlocks them together. Its “metamorphosis” began with lectures on the Odysseyat the author’s alma mater, the University of Virginia. He was frustrated as he tried to shape them into a book until a friend suggested he write it as a “ring composition… elaborate series of interlocked narratives, each nested within another in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls.” In the first of three sections, “The Lycée Français,” Mendelsohn tells the story of Erich Auerbach, a German Jew who secured a position at the University of Istanbul, where he wrote the influential Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a “paean to the civilization of the continent he has just fled,” a study in which the author “seeks to understand how literature makes reality feel real.” In “The Education of Young Girls,” Mendelsohn discusses the massively popular The Adventures of Telemachus, an “imitative and inventive” narrative about Odysseus’ son written in the 1690s by the theologian François Fenelón. Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson were huge fans. In “The Temple,” Mendelsohn examines The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, whose literary “meanderings,” just like Mendelsohn’s own book, “ultimately form a giant ring that ties together many disparate tales and experiences.” This luminous narrative, in which the tales of each of Mendelsohn’s three chosen exiled writers appealingly intertwine, is about many things—memory, literature, family, immigration, and religion—and it ends where it began, with a “wanderer” entering “an unknown city after a long voyage.”
This slender, exquisite book rewards on many levels.
