PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... the first full-scale account of Parry’s short life, mysterious demise and long-lived influence ... Despite his enormous influence—and an enormous archive—as a subject for biography Parry frustrates Kanigel and, frankly, me. His collected papers run to nearly 500 pages, and the recordings and transcripts he made number in the thousands. Yet his writing rarely strays from technical questions; in his interviews with singers he let his assistant do the talking. In Kanigel’s hands, we see him laughing at a Harvard student production of a Greek tragedy, complaining about bed lice and driving his muddy Ford through the back roads of the Balkans. But his inner life, the source of his scholarly drive — even what it was about the Greek epics that he loved so much — remain a mystery for reader and biographer alike ... In his work, Parry imagined a form of literature at once deeply traditional and uncannily modern, created not by a single genius standing at the head of the Western canon, but rather by hundreds or, perhaps, thousands of performers in venues big and small, composing and reworking songs for their audiences. If he himself resists biography, that may be only appropriate.
