Constellation
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- 4,99 €
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- 4,99 €
Publisher Description
On 27 October 1949, a Lockheed Constellation passenger plane left Paris for New York. Hours later, it disappeared on approach to its scheduled stopover in the Azores. It was found on a mountainside five miles from its intended landing zone.
There were no survivors.
Among those lost in the accident were heavyweight boxer Marcel Cerdan flying to New York for a world title fight; 30-year-old virtuoso violinist Ginette Neveu; Kay Kamen, Walt Disney's merchandising tsar; five Basque shepherds emigrating to America; a pilot who ran missions for the Free French during the war.
Constellation tells the untold true stories of the forty-eight men and women who died on board, and paints a moving portrait of their place in the changing post-war world and of their hopes and dreams for the life awaiting them across the Atlantic.
Adrien Bosc's magnetic debut novel is a memorial to an air disaster that happened half a century ago. But it is also a love song to the forgotten lives that every tragedy scatters around it like so much debris, and a poignant investigation into the nature of collective tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French author Bosc's slender yet ambitious novel re-creates the final flight of Air France F-BAZN, a Lockheed Constellation en route from Paris to New York that crashed into Mount Redondo in the Azores on Oct. 27, 1949. It is best remembered for carrying Marcel Cerdan, a boxer and dith Piaf's lover, who was flying to a scheduled return bout with Jake "the Bronx Bull" LaMotta. But there were also 37 other passengers and 11 crew members on board, and the author seeks to redress the imbalance by reimagining several of these unknown lives for the reader, including pilot Jean de la No e, who flew for the Free French during World War II; Ginette Neveu, a violin prodigy who performed all over the world; Kay Kamen, a merchandiser for Walt Disney, whose biggest claim to fame was the invention of the Mickey Mouse watch; Ernest Lowenstein, a tannery owner who was on his way to New York to reconcile with his wife, whom he had divorced in Reno only one month before; and Rene Hauth, a counterespionage agent during the war. Echoing such classics as Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Ernest K. Gann's Fate Is the Hunter, the book dramatizes the flight and its aftermath. And the author's metacommentary transforms the narrative into a profound meditation on the far-reaching interconnectedness of tragic events.
