Odyssea

The Greeks used to be brave heroes. The greasiest of them was the Ithaca king, but even his tricks are short for the gods... Because Odysseus was in over his head, he constructed the Danaian gift of a horse and helped the Greeks - then still called the Achaeans, of course - win a ten-year war with the Trojans. But even his renowned cunning cannot match the arsenal of the Olympic pantheon's stratagems. After the victors in the conquered city behaved seriously like cattle, not sacrificing a bone of a ram to the gods and mutilating their one-eyed relative on top of it, Zeus, Poseidon & Co. to the point that their vengeance knew no bounds. And they deployed the appropriate technology. All they had to do was let loose the winds that blew the ships of the Greeks in all directions on their return! And so it takes Odysseus another ten years as King of Ithaca to make his way across the Mediterranean to his native goat island in the shadow of the Peloponnese, to face the suitors who desire the throne rather than his ageing wife Penelope. It would be said, therefore, that the famous Troy koumak was subjected to a more than harrowing journey, whether it involved a battle with man-eaters, sirens, a chupr witch, or a precarious passage through a gap between... er... gigantic rocky cheeks. And hasn't it always been the case that the journey itself is the destination? After all, our hard-tested sailor gets to have a lot of sex and produce a couple of children whose origins patriarchal antiquity did not frown upon. At the end of Fry's tetralogy, The Age of Men opens: creatures not only deadly, but also endlessly funny. As the author himself. The popular British comedian has borrowed the most colourful parts of Homer's story to attract generations without a classical education to the narrative and to show them situations that happen to us again and again, regardless of the year. "Fry has mastered the magic that strips ancient stories of their veil of deadpan detachment, breathing life and contemporary relevance into them. Thanks to him, we don't have to see Philoctetes or Clytaimnéstra in the characters. Let's think of them as next-door neighbors." - The Guardian "The clever humour and exaggeration (...) remain, but there is also a sense of nostalgia about the book. Maybe because it's the end of the series and with it the end of the carefree world of all-powerful gods. It is simply a time of people and their tragic fates." - seznam.cz "You must have heard many a nickname that people have attributed to Ulysses of Ithaca. The kinder ones call me 'clever' and 'wise', but the stories I will tell you will soon convince you otherwise. I've also heard 'versatile', 'adaptable' and 'resourceful'. You can live with that. Most often, however, I hear words like 'sly', 'cunning', 'cunning' and 'cunning', usually accompanied by disapproving snorting. But if I had to choose the moniker that best describes me, I would say 'curious'. You know, I like to explore. I am attracted to new people, new places and new ideas. As you will soon see, it's like a blessing, as well as the curse." - excerpt from the text "I am convinced, that in the world, where accurate data and information are the lifeblood of the world, where you could say, that data and information have taken the place of gods -, we shouldn't forget the power of the non-exact, on the power of story, myth, of the ceremony, of ritual and symbol. I myself have found myself in Greek myths a thousand times: as a fool, a loser, a criminal, a lover, a villain and - very rarely - a hero. But I didn't recognize myself in ones and zeros and digital data files even once. It can be very hard to believe in reality or make sense of it, but fiction is usually quite plausible. Yes, the Greeks got there before us. But that's because they lived before us - and in a way we are all their descendants." - the author's credo at the end of the series