Book 1 commences with an Olympian debate, while Odysseus' tormentor Poseidon happens to be away in Ethiopia. Athene makes her way to Ithaka, to spur on Odysseus' son, Telemachos. Where's Odysseus? "detained" by the nymph Kalypso (although in some post-Homeric accounts, Odysseus is rather less "unwilling," as he fathers children by her!). In fact, these first few books are sometimes characterized as "The Telemachy," since they concentrate on this young (approximately your age) man's "heart grieving deep within him" (114). His life is overshadowed by his father's absent but looming legacy. (It's also overshadowed by the example of a righteously vengeful son, Orestes.) The ever-present obligation of hospitality, so rudely abused by the suitors ("eating up my substance" 250), is rightly extended by the "thoughtful" Telemachos to Mentes(/Athene).
There's much to be said about long-suffering
Penelope, who is introduced at the close of the book. The purpose of
lyric – and of artistic creation more generally (including this very
poem) – is self-reflexively staged through her disagreement
with her son about "this sad / song" (340–41).
My favorite lines: "My mother says that indeed I
am his. I for my part / do not know. Nobody really knows his own
father" (215–16). In part, Telemachos is simply repeating a truism,
invoked in a debate
about Shakespeare in James Joyce's Ulysses (itself
a retelling of the Odyssey,
set in modern-day Dublin): "A father, Stephen said, battling against
hopelessness, is a necessary evil . . . Paternity may be a legal
fiction. Who is the father of any
son that any son should love him or he any son?"
On a deeper, less forensic level, Telemachos is
taking a factual statement (about the father who has literally been
absent for two decades) and spinning it into a philosophical meditation:
can one really ever know one's parents? As
Telemachos sets off in search of his father, this journey will also,
predictably, entail a search for himself as he is coming into adulthood.
He, too, will need to depart his island home before he can return to
it, no longer stuck in stasis.
(In these notes, I cite the Lattimore translation.)