Three Rings

 

Three Rings by Daniel Mendelsohn (2020 University of Virginia Press, hardcover 116pp)

 

Following completion of his Holocaust-themed family history “The Lost” (previously reviewed here), author Daniel Mendelsohn suffered some sort of breakdown being unable to write and unwilling to even leave his home. A colleague suggested that he write something closer to his academic roots and the result was “An Odyssey” (previously reviewed here also). When the manuscript for that book was seen by an editor it was suggested that the structure be changed so Mendelsohn decided to use the ancient Greek technique of ‘ring composition’ – stories that digress and then loop back to where and when they started. “Three Rings” his latest book again uses this structure and is also about this structure in a way.

It’s a slim volume that paints portraits of three writers, all of which found themselves in exile. Erich Auerbach on the run from the Nazis finds himself in Turkey where he spends the next decade writing one of the seminal books about western writing. Francois Fenelon, a young priest in late 1600s France who is chosen to help educate the children of the rich but ends up producing “The Adventures of Telemachus” one of the best-selling books in Europe for a century - one that takes sly digs at royalty and teaches morality and ethics to its readership. Finally, W.G. Sebald who found he couldn’t exist in Germany with its Nazi past and lived the last 30 years of his life in England where he wrote several books that skipped about topics and specialised in digressions, including his most famous “The Rings of Saturn”.

Mendelsohn skilfully loops back and forth between these men’s lives, the work they produced and how it affected the wider world. He also finds the subtle and more direct connections between them, some of which might surprise. Also, we learn a little more about Mendelsohn himself, his past and his writings

Like I said this is a short book, you can easily finish it in once session. I’m not sure it really stands alone. In some ways it’s more like a coda or afterword to “the Lost” and “An Odyssey”. With more digressions and loops it could easily be expanded into something more.