Return to Ithaca (novel)

Return to Ithaca: A Novel about the Present (Swedish: Strändernas svall: En roman om det närvarande) is a 1946 novel by Swedish author Eyvind Johnson. It is based on Homer's story of Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. The plot recounts the events surrounding the Greek hero Odysseus, his journey home from the Trojan War, his wife Penelope's waiting for him, and his son Telemachos's eagerness to meet his father. On its publication, homerologists objected to the novel's modern naturalistic scene description, and its anti-heroic presentation, but it was praised by Swedish literary critics. More recently, scholars have explored the tension between the fictional narrator's subjective experience and the described reality, and the issue of violence. They have noted the novel's structure with parallel events, a metafiction and a narrative in Johnson's own time just after the Second World War. In 2013, the SVT program Babel named it one of five classic works of Swedish literature that should form the start of a Swedish literary canon. It has been published in many editions and translated into approximately twenty languages.