In 1899 Jack London, beginning his career as a writer, sold a story to Atlantic Monthly for $120. Drawing on his experiences during the Klondike gold rush and on the Yukon River, it was a tale of an Aleutian native wandering the Arctic for years on end in search of his wife, who had been stolen by a powerful Nordic sea captain. London titled his saga, “An Odyssey of the North.”

It is a fascinating venture, full of crisply realized landscapes, exotic characters, and told aslant by bystanders such as the Malemute Kid, who are bunking at a Canadian waystation for men and dogs traveling by sled over the icy trails, when Naass, the Aleutian, first shows up. London put way too much plot in this novice venture. It lacks the narrative drive of The Call of the Wild or the suspense of White Fang, but the editors of the Atlantic Monthly realized they’d found a born writer.

And where did Jack London find his inspiration? A few pages into the story, the Malamute kid nicknames the Aleutian “Mr. Ulysses,” and cites the legend of the mysterious stranger traveling the Bering Sea and the Alaskan hinterland in search of no one knew what. Clearly London, despite his meager education, knew his Homer. “The Odyssey of the North” was his homage to the great epic. Naass, incidentally, does find Unga, his Penelope, but things don’t work out as well as they did for the original Odysseus. This is Jack London’s world, after all. 

The Odyssey haunts Western literature and the arts, probably more than the blood-soaked Iliad. Christopher Nolan’s cinematic extravaganza may or may not live up to the epic. I have not yet seen it because all the IMAX theaters in New York are booked solid for weeks to come. But that won’t stop me from surfing its wake.

I don’t read Greek but I have half a bookshelf of English translations, four of which I’ve read completely, and I may, in time, get to the others. Here is how some of........

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