On Christopher Nolan's *The Odyssey*

I walked into this film carrying two prejudices, and the remarkable thing is that it dismantled both of them — one in its first act, and one in its final minutes.

The first prejudice was the obvious one. I expected a "woke" retelling: casting unmoored from any sense of time or place, Indian sailors rowing beside Asian ones, a Black Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. I was braced for annoyance. But annoyance requires that the thing being changed actually matters, and Nolan's first move is to declare that it doesn't. His war was never about Helen. Compare it with *Troy*, where Brad Pitt's Helen is filmed as a shining, luminous figure — the camera insists you understand why a war would be fought over that face. Nolan strips this away entirely and replaces it with something colder and more plausible: the war is about controlling the trade routes into the Black Sea, which means controlling the Dardanelles, which means Troy. Helen is a pretext. And once nobody is fighting over a face, the question of whose face it is stops mattering. My first prejudice didn't survive the setup.

It helped that the setup itself is magnificent. This Troy is visually humbler than the one in *Troy* — the walls less beautiful, the city less imposing — and yet its taking is superior to anything I've seen in any other film. The music, the anguish, the sense of a clock running out. Above all, the horse: Nolan stays *inside* it while it's being moved, with men packed in the dark, drowning in sweat and fear, and when one of them starts to break and cry out, the others have to silence him — I believe it's Odysseus himself who kills one of the noisy ones. That detail, brutal and small, tells you early on what kind of victory this is going to be. The film knows it too, though I didn't understand how deeply until the end.

There was another early signal I appreciated, though at first I took it as mere set dressing for people like me: the mention of the Sea Peoples. I've been following the story of the Bronze Age Collapse closely for a while now — the raiders from the sea who appear in the records of Egypt, of Ur, of Uruk, right around the time the Trojan War is supposed to have happened; the entire eastern Mediterranean system unraveling; the four hundred years of darkness before civilization crawled back out of the ashes. Seeing that acknowledged in a Hollywood epic felt like a gift to the historically curious — a nod that Troy wasn't an isolated legend but one casualty in a much larger catastrophe. I filed it away as a nice historical touch. It turned out to be the film's thesis, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Because my second prejudice was still intact, and for most of the running time the film seemed to be confirming it: that this would be a diminished Odysseus, a faded version of the character. The domestic half of the story gave me no such trouble. Penelope is wonderful — the performance, the wooden doors of the palace, the texture of that whole world — and the suitors are exactly what they should be: children in men's bodies, without courage or real manhood, trying to lure their way into power through a marriage they haven't earned. Telemachus was a surprising and effective piece of casting. And the long prelude to the reckoning is superb — Odysseus in his beggar's rags, entering his own hall unrecognized, asking only for a chance to string the bow no one else can draw. Patient, humiliating, quietly triumphant. (The reckoning itself, once he reveals himself, tips into something else — suddenly it's Jason Bourne clearing a room of agents, which is a lot of choreography for a man whose weapon is supposed to be his mind. And I confess Argos the dog and the business with the arrows left me cold.)

No, the trouble was with Odysseus at sea. He ties himself to the mast for no reason the film cares to give beyond caprice — he simply wants to be the only man who has heard the sirens and lived. He blinds the Cyclops when escaping might have been enough. Twice, the most resourceful man in Greek literature behaves like a reckless amateur. Now, having gone back to check myself against Homer, I have to be fair to Nolan here: the recklessness is canonical — he just relocated and hollowed it out. In the book, blinding Polyphemus is pure necessity (only the Cyclops can move the stone sealing the cave); the reckless act comes *after*, when Odysseus, safely at sea, cannot resist shouting his real name in a boast — and it's that vanity that lets the Cyclops curse him to Poseidon and costs him ten years. And the mast is not caprice in Homer at all: Circe herself instructs him in the wax and the ropes, and the sirens' lure is not their melody but their promise of knowledge — they claim to know everything that happened at Troy. Bound listening is sanctioned curiosity, maybe the oldest pre-commitment device in literature: cunning applied to his own weakness. So the streak of vanity is truly Homeric; what Nolan removed is the *reason* — and an Odysseus who is reckless without reason is just reckless, which is to say stupid, which is the one thing Odysseus must never be.

Then the ending seemed to compound the offense: to get home, Odysseus must give in, surrender himself to Poseidon, let the sea decide. The one man who defies the gods — giving in. I felt the sourness rising, and here I owe Homer another correction, this time at my own expense. That surrender scene is Nolan's invention: in the book, Calypso releases Odysseus because Zeus commands it, and no price of submission is ever named. But the god-defying rationalist I was defending is not quite Homer's either. Homer's Odysseus is pious, leans on Athena constantly, and is even prophesied to make his peace with Poseidon through sacrifice after the homecoming — reconciliation deferred, not refused. My Odysseus, the man who lives by reason as if the gods were not there, owes less to Homer than to Epicurus — the philosopher who effectively let the gods die, who said the world can be explained without them. I was projecting a Hellenistic mind onto a Bronze Age king. I haven't yet read the Odyssey itself — I've been working through the Greek epics via Stephen Fry, the myths, the heroes, *Troy*, but not yet the prime source — so Nolan and I were, in a sense, both adapting a book I hadn't read. His invention just ran opposite to mine: where I rationalized Odysseus, he humbled him.

One thing I did verify the book contains, because it's the passage that made me want to read it: Odysseus's encounter with the dead, where the shade of Achilles tells him he would rather be a hired hand serving a poor, landless farmer than rule as king over all the perished — a flat repudiation, from the mouth of the man who chose eternal glory over long life, of the bargain itself. That exchange has been a touchstone in my own life; it has shaped real decisions, taught me to choose a full life surrounded by family over burning myself up for a cause, however noble. The film skips it, and I missed it. Perhaps its spirit survives elsewhere — in Calypso, interestingly softened here: not the malevolent captor I remembered, keeping Odysseus for her own interest, but a woman blurring his memories to spare him their bitterness. An escapist's bargain offered and finally refused, which is Achilles' regret run in reverse.

And then came the scene that made the whole thing worth it — the golden nugget, the part I'd rewatch over and over if I ever find a clip of it. Odysseus, still a beggar, speaking with Penelope through the door. And he tells her that everything being sung and celebrated about him — the horse, the sack of Troy — is a violation of Zeus's law, the law of hospitality and sanctuary, the thing that is sacred to everyone. He has been made immortal in song for breaking the one thing that holds men together. And he follows the thought all the way down: when the sacred bonds between men are broken, there is no civilization left. Nothing separates us from beasts. He even names his own age — calls it the Bronze Age — and there's been plenty of internet hate for that line, but who cares about the name? The point is that he *knows it's an ending*. He can feel that the tacit contract between men is dissolving, and that when it dissolves, nothing but darkness follows. Which is exactly what history records: four hundred years of it.

Then he says the thing that had been sitting underneath the entire film, waiting to be named. These raids by men who live on islands and come from the sea to destroy cities — who are they, if not the Greeks? *They* are the Sea Peoples. Not by blood or origin, but by what the broken contract has made of them. And suddenly everything reorganized itself in my memory. The recklessness at the mast and in the Cyclops's cave wasn't a diminished Odysseus; it was a damned one — a man who has already broken the sacred thing and is watching himself become the catastrophe. The surrender to Poseidon isn't the defeat of reason by faith; it's what's left when a man realizes his reason was the instrument of the crime. I had misjudged him in every scene, the same way I'd misjudged the film in its casting call. The Sea Peoples weren't a historical Easter egg. They were the mirror.

That is why the scene landed so hard on me — partly because I love that stretch of history, but mostly because of what it implies about now. Who knows how close we are, in 2026, to that same erosion of the sacred things between men — no closer, perhaps, than Odysseus thought himself while wheeling a gift to the gods through the gates of a city he meant to burn. When the sacred contract dies, the shadows arrive. We might be watching it happen.

Written by a Drunk, Read by the Bewildered: My Journey Through Sátántangó

I just finished listening to László Krasznahorkai's Sátántangó, and I need to talk about it — because this book did something to me that no novel has done in a very long time. It broke me first, then rebuilt me, and I'm still not sure I came out the same person on the other side.

Blaming Myself

For the first stretch of the book, I was convinced the problem was me. Hungarian names are not easy on a foreign ear — they tangle, they blur into one another, they refuse to stay pinned to the characters they belong to. So when I couldn't follow the narrative, when the story seemed to drift and circle and lose itself in the mud, I assumed I was the faulty one. I wasn't reading carefully enough. I wasn't paying attention. I was missing something.

I wasn't missing anything. The book was doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The Revelation

Here is what I eventually understood, and what made the whole experience flip from frustrating to extraordinary: the narrative reads the way it does because it is, in essence, written by a drunk. Not metaphorically. The doctor — that magnificent, ruined figure at the heart of the novel — is the one assembling this world for us. A man soaked in pálinka, days without food, barely upright, scribbling observations about a decaying estate from his window. Of course the narrative wanders. Of course it circles back on itself. Of course the details are sometimes maddeningly precise about things that don't matter and hopelessly vague about things that do. That's how a brilliant drunkard writes.

And here I was, reading a Nobel Prize–worthy work of literature, thinking it was poorly written. The joke was on me — and it's a magnificent joke.

The Rain. My God, the Rain.

I need to talk about the rain. It never stops. It is always raining in Sátántangó. The mud is everywhere. People are constantly falling in it, trudging through it, soaked by it. The entire world of the novel is waterlogged, heavy, sinking. It's oppressive in a way that starts to feel physical — you don't just read the rain, you feel it on your skin, in your bones. I live in Luxembourg, and I swear, from now on, every grey drizzle will transport me straight back to that godforsaken Hungarian estate. Every puddle will be a portal.

When Is This?

One of the most disorienting aspects of the book is its refusal to anchor you in time. For long stretches, I genuinely could not tell whether I was in the Middle Ages, the 1800s, the interwar years, or some post-apocalyptic ruin. The world is so stripped down, so elemental — mud, churches, crude technology, bodies in rooms — that it could be any century of misery.

Then a car appears. Then someone mentions the sound of a plane. Then, absurdly, a bartender is smacking a television set, and suddenly you're yanked into something resembling modernity. But even then, the novel resists letting you settle. It keeps you in that fog of temporal dislocation, never quite sure what year you're standing in. And I think that's the point — this is a story about a place where time has essentially stopped, where nothing moves forward, where the rain just keeps falling on the same mud it fell on yesterday and the day before that.

The Checkered Jacket and the Red Tie

Then there's Irimiás — that extraordinary, contradictory figure in his checkered jacket and red tie. I still picture a kind of chess-patterned blazer, absurdly flamboyant for the world he moves through. In the police station he's almost a dandy; in other chapters he's stoic, calculating, even sinister. He is noble to mothers and cruel to followers. He inspires devotion and orchestrates betrayal. He is messianic and fraudulent at the same time. I still don't fully understand the police scenes, the secret agent subplot, the explosives. Maybe I'm not supposed to. Maybe the drunk doctor doesn't understand them either.

The Book That Writes Itself

This is where Sátántangó ascends from a great novel to something genuinely astonishing. The doctor, that pálinka-soaked observer, doesn't just narrate the world — he writes it. You see him attempt it, fail, try again, and then, on the third attempt, he produces a passage that is unmistakably the opening of the very book you are reading. The creation meets the creator. The text loops back on itself like the tango of its title — forward, backward, always returning.

Years ago, I read Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla — Fog — and was thrilled by that moment when the character Augusto marches into Salamanca to confront his own author. "What are you doing with my life?" he demands, and Unamuno replies, coolly, that he can do whatever he wants, because whatever he writes becomes reality for his creation. It's a scene that still gives me chills.

Sátántangó pulls off something similar, but more subtly, more devastatingly. There is no dramatic confrontation between character and author. Instead, the doctor simply sits down and begins to write, and the text he produces becomes the text we've been reading all along. It's a quieter trick, but once you see it, the entire novel reorganizes itself in your mind. Every wandering sentence, every drunken digression, every maddening lack of structure — it all makes sense. It was all by design.

The Trip

I keep coming back to this word: trip. Not in the sense of travel, but in the sense of a hallucinogenic experience. Reading Sátántangó felt like being injected with someone else's fever dream. There are moments of startling beauty and moments of absolute squalor. There are reincarnations out of nowhere. There is a cruelty toward small creatures that is almost unbearable. And through it all, the rain keeps falling, and the sentences keep spiraling, and you just have to surrender to the current.

This is not a usual novel. It does not behave the way novels are supposed to behave. It does not comfort, it does not resolve, it does not reward the reader with clarity. And yet — and here is what I can't quite get over — it is magnificent. Once I understood that the chaos was intentional, that the confusion was the art, something unlocked. I stopped fighting the book and let it wash over me, like the rain over that estate.

An Irreverent Injection of Creativity

I came to Sátántangó after loving Unamuno's Niebla years ago, and the two books now feel like they belong in conversation with each other — works that refuse to stay inside the frame, that let the machinery of fiction show through the seams. They are irreverent in the deepest sense: they do not bow to the conventions of storytelling, and they dare you to keep up.

Sátántangó has left a curious, persistent mark on me. It's the kind of book that doesn't sit neatly on a shelf in your memory but instead leaks into your daily life. It rains in Luxembourg, and I think of the estate. I see a checkered pattern and think of Irimiás. I watch someone stumble and think of the mud.

What a great, bewildering, exhilarating trip. I went in confused. I came out changed. And I think that's exactly what Krasznahorkai intended.