The Confabulist
A Novel
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Cellist of Sarajevo, an exciting new novel that uses the life and sudden death of Harry Houdini to weave a tale of magic, intrigue, and illusion.
What is real and what is an illusion? Can you trust your memory to provide an accurate record of what has happened in your life?
The Confabulist is a clever , entertaining, and suspenseful narrative that weaves together the rise and fall of world-famous Harry Houdini with the surprising story of Martin Strauss, an unknown man whose fate seems forever tied to the magician’s in a way that will ultimately startle and amaze. It is at once a vivid portrait of an alluring, late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century world; a front-row seat to a world-class magic show; and an unexpected love story. In the end, the book is a kind of magic trick in itself: there is much more to Martin than meets the eye.
Historically rich and ingeniously told, this is a novel about magic and memory, truth and illusion, and the ways that love, hope, grief, and imagination can—for better or for worse—alter what we perceive and believe.
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.
