Little Caesar
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Ludwig Unger’s life held such promise. His parents were artists and, from an early age, his own musical genius had marked him out for a stellar career in the world’s concert halls. In his mother’s imagination, Ludwig is already on the way to surpassing her most ambitious dreams for him. But in reality, and for now, he’s playing in local cocktail bars and the two of them are living alone in a storm-lashed clifftop cottage in East Anglia. As the forceful winter seas bash away at the coastline, and Ludwig plunks away at the piano, he begins to tell a woman his story: a story of beauty and decay, of a child’s faith and parental betrayal, and of the importance, in the end, of self-sacrifice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As Wieringa s second English-language novel (after Joe Speedboat) begins, down-and-out musician Ludwig Unger returns to coastal Kings Ness, England, where the houses are in constant danger of tumbling into the sea and the rabbits are all inexplicably diseased, making it immediately clear that we re in surreal territory despite the lucidity of the narration and prose. From his perch at a hotel lounge piano where he performs schmaltzy standards, Ludwig tells his tale: upon discovering that his mother was actually Eve LeSage, the Grace Kelley of porn, Ludwig, then 21, traveled to L.A. to confront her, only to witness her Las Vegas comeback after two decades out of the spotlight. Longing for less radical expressions of love from his mother, Ludwig goes with her and her production company to Vienna and Prague. Eve s all-consuming sexuality makes a liability of Ludwig at every turn, but it s an unforeseen problem with her attempt at a career revival that propels Ludwig to flee to Panama, where he encounters the sinister father who abandoned the family. Although perfectly charming as picaresque, the tragedy of Unger s plight registers just as strongly as its understated oddness. There are plenty of precedents for the novel-as-game (fellow Dutch author Cees Nooteboom, for instance) but in Little Caesar, Wieringa plays for keeps.
