With its gods, monsters and dizzying scale, Homer’s the Odyssey is deemed by many to be unfilmable, though it hasn’t stopped directors from having a go, including Christopher Nolan, whose blockbuster adaptation comes to cinemas next week. An audiobook would seem a smart choice, allowing listeners to deploy their imaginations to conjure dark sorcery, supernatural beasts and epic storms rather than leaning on CGI.
This classic recording, first published in 2006, is based on Ian Johnston’s much-admired translation. It is narrated by the Game of Thrones actor Anton Lesser, who brings gravitas and texture to this tale of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his efforts to get home after the 10-year Trojan War. Odysseus’s journey is fraught as he encounters the wrath of the sea god Poseidon in the form of a man-eating monster and a whirlpool that swallows ships. Then comes Calypso, the beautiful goddess-nymph and daughter of Atlas who keeps him on an island for seven years in the hope that he will stay as her husband.
Back in Ithaca, Odysseus’s wife Penelope – who doesn’t know if her husband is dead or alive – is being besieged by suitors, while their adult son Telemachus, who hasn’t seen his father since he was an infant, struggles to maintain order and embarks on various sojourns to track down him down. Then we’re with the gods on Olympus as they sit around arguing about which mortals they will aid and on which they will rain down hell and damnation. Will Odysseus make it home and, if he does, will he be welcome?
Available via Naxos, 12hr 45min
Further listening
Music as Medicine
Daniel Levitin, Penguin, 12hr 17min
A paean to the healing properties of music, Levitin’s book investigates the connections between music and the human body and brain and tests the argument for the use of music as medicine. Read by the author.
Butcher
Joyce Carol Oates, 4th Estate, 13hr 11min
A cast including Edoardo Ballerini, Cassandra Campbell and Amy Shiels star in this chilling fictional biography of a doctor who experiments on the female patients of a New Jersey lunatic asylum and becomes a leading light in gyno-psychiatry.
