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Oedipus on the Road by Henry Bauchau

Author, poet and psychoanalyst Henry Bauchau is the father of actor Patrick Bauchau. The elder Bauchau has won several major French and Belgian literary prizes. He was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy in 1990. This is his first work published in the United States.

Reviews and commentary:

From the publisher: "Oedipus on the Road is a rendering of the journey that leads Oedipus from Thebes to Colonus - and from a world of exile to one of legend. This is the chapter that Sophocles never wrote, the redemptive passage of the fallen, blinded king to his final - this time glorious - encounter with destiny. Bauchau finds Oedipus stranded outside the walls of his former palace, eye sockets and soul still bleeding, and leads him - along with his daughter Antigone and the seductive shepherd-bandit Clius, whose loyalty to the pair probably has less to do with his allegiance to Oedipus than his intentions toward his daughter - through a geographical and spiritual landscape littered with the physical, artistic, and mental rites of passage that separate Oedipus from immortality."

From Publisher's Weekly: "Unlike other famous modern retellings of this great story (e.g., those by Cocteau and Freud), this novel is not, in any obvious or aggressive way, a reinterpretation. Bauchau, a Belgian poet and psychoanalyst, tells of Oedipus' harrowing final journey from Thebes to his redemption at Colonus. In doing so, he admirably recreates the social milieu of the period, and his vivid scenes recounting Oedipus' encounters with shepherds, hunters and bandits along the way make the novel feel at once modern and convincingly ancient. His Oedipus is not only a heroic figure struggling with his fate, but also a beggar, sculptor, singer, arbitrator and doctor. On his road to Colonus, he is accompanied by Clius, a notorious bandit who's moved by the old king to become his protector, and by his daughter and sister, Antigone, the most complex and interesting character in the novel. Antigone's coming-of-age makes her a kind of female Telemachus, a child who struggles between her own ambition and her loyalty and love for her infamous father. During their travels, Oedipus begins to understand the ordinary and personal nature of tragedy. In the end, one feels that Oedipus' tale has been subtly modernized, in the sense that characters are givenand permitted to be aware oftheir great and intricate psychological identities in the face of unyielding fate."(Aug.)

From New York Times Book Review, 09/21/1997, Reviewed by David Sacks: "Here's a novel that skillfully reworks the Greek myth of Oedipus..., giving it new significance. Through characters and events belonging ostensibly to ancient Greece, Oedipus on the Road touches on up-to-date themes like multiculturalism, feminism and psychotherapy. It is a memorable book: ambitious, highly original, often moving, sometimes willfully irksome....[T]he story satisfies one by its daring, confident use of myth and its vision of healing."

See Also:

• Henry Bauchau Links

Photograph of Henry Bauchau © Mimmo Jodice/Corbis. Do not use photo without prior, written permission.