Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate

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This moving book intertwines memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, telling the stories of three exiled writers—Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald—and their connections to the classics, from Homer to Mimesis. Hailed as "exquisite" by The New York Times, the work explores the mysterious links between the randomness of life and the artfulness of storytelling. It chronicles how these writers turned to classical literature to create their own masterpieces that reflect on narrative itself. Auerbach, a Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany, wrote his seminal study Mimesis in Istanbul. Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop, crafted a sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus, which served as a veiled critique of the Sun King and became a bestseller in Europe for a century, leading to his banishment. Sebald, a German novelist exiled in England, created meandering narratives that delve into themes of displacement and nostalgia. Interwoven with their tales are Mendelsohn's own struggles to write about the Holocaust and his experiences reading the Odyssey with his father. As the narrative unfolds, a climactic revelation connects the lives of these three writers across time and space, prompting a reevaluation of the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.