The Confabulist
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Magic and madness collide in this remarkable novel about the power of perception.
Harry Houdini was once the most famous person on the planet. He is the man who can make the impossible seem real. So when, on the most extraordinary night of his life, Martin Strauss accidentally kills the great magician, his own life is turned upside down. He loses his home, the woman he loves and every hope he once had. Now his doctor has informed him he is losing his mind too, and Martin decides it is time to set the record straight with Houdini's daughter, Alice.
But this record will not straighten easily. A lifetime of sleight of hand takes some explaining...
Life and death, memory and forgetting, the thrill of escape: Steven Galloway has unleashed the power of a luminous imagination in this dazzling new novel.
Steven Galloway was born in Vancouver in 1975. He is the author of three prestigious novels including The Cellist of Sarajevo, which was longlisted for the 2012 IMPAC Dublin literary Award and has been translated into numerous languages.
textpublishing.com.au
'Fascinating...A brilliant novel, and one that virtually demands multiple readings to pick up all the subtleties...' Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the author of The Cellist of Sarajevo comes this colorful but hard-to-swallow reimagining of Harry Houdini's life and death. The book opens with narrator Martin Strauss asserting, "I didn't just kill Harry Houdini. I killed him twice." Strauss is Galloway's fictionalized version of the young man who famously punched the famed illusionist in the stomach at a theater in Montreal in 1926, rupturing Houdini's appendix, which caused his death two days later. Or did it? The hypothesis that Houdini may have survived is the book's biggest (and most outrageous) conceit one that may test readers' patience and credulity. As Martin pursues the "dead" Houdini while trying to evade conspirators who want him silenced, evocative flashbacks limn Houdini's rise to stardom, his great illusions, and his crusade to expose mediums and other charlatans. All this is well-trod ground, but what is different is the use Galloway makes of a recent idea in Houdini lore: that he worked for U.S. and British intelligence "the skills of a magician and the skills of a spy were nearly identical." Galloway makes this notion somewhat believable, but the basic premise of this stylish but convoluted novel Houdini's survival remains difficult to accept.
