The book’s bipartite structure reflects this tension. Through an extended reading aimed primarily at an audience of non-specialists, Van Nortwick argues that the Odyssey owes its continued resonance to the tension that emerges between two competing versions of Odysseus: the centripetal hero, whose interests align with the imperatives of the nostos plot, and the centrifugal hero, whose desires extend beyond return, revenge, and restoration, and whose actions often run counter to those goals.
This book, originally published in 2009 and now available in paperback, constitutes the author’s attempt to account for an apparent incongruity: though the Odyssey has engaged the imaginations of generations of readers, the story of the returning hero seems in itself to lack “the requisite complexity and richness to account for the poem’s enduring power” (x).
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