Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate

(Paperback)

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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 Lethem
In 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 Odyssey,The 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.

Reviews

Exquisite Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back to
New York Times Book Review

As always, the author's voice blends authority with considerable warmth and charm, luring readers into his complex intellectual enthusiasms Three Rings,a short but profoundly moving work, clings with tenacity to a belief in the regenerative power of literature
Wall Street Journal

Spectacular The reader feels the flow of a strong narrative, trusts the authors seafaring skills and embarks on a brilliant journey Three Ringsis a glorious celebration of multiplicity, diversity, journeys, transformations and our common humanity
Times Literary Supplement

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
Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofHomeland Elegies

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 Ringshas the keeled force of a long poem
Sebastian Barry

Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet, Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles.Three Ringsis a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art
Joyce Carol Oates

Daniel Mendelsohn'sThree Ringsis erudition, essayism, and memoir This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise
Jonathan Lethem

Author Bio

Daniel Mendelsohn was born in Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and is contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. His previous books include the memoir The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the international best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix Mdicis, and many other honours. He teaches at Bard College.