The Confabulist: A Novel

by Steven Galloway Narrated by Jason Culp

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

02/24/2014
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. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (May)

Kirkus Reviews

2014-04-03
In this darkly fanciful take on the Houdini legend by the acclaimed author of The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008), the magician's life is recounted through the damaged memory of the fan who killed him with a punch to the stomach in 1926. The ultimate in unreliable narrators, Martin Strauss, a magic expert, suffers from a rare condition in which his brain invents new memories to replace lost ones. According to him, Houdini actually survived the appendix-rupturing gut punch and went into hiding. Obsessed with finding "the most famous person on the planet," Strauss is stalked by nefarious sorts himself. Shadowy flashbacks to Houdini's secret alternative life as an agent for U. S. and British intelligence explain this chain of events. The novel also examines Houdini's friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle, a devout believer in spiritualism, through whom the nonbelieving Houdini—nee Ehrich Weiss, son of a rabbi—meets his match: Boston medium Margery Crandon, seductive head of a ring of spiritualists which controls the U. S. Congress. Much of the material pertaining to Houdini's rise to fame is familiar, though the way he discounts and offhandedly explains his tricks and escapes is amusing. Galloway's inventions can sometimes be a bit of a stretch, but his explorations of the relationships between truth and illusion, fiction and reality, need and conscience are stimulating and affecting. It's only too bad he feels the need to state those themes so explicitly: "There's no way to know whether anything we have seen or experienced is real or imagined"; "A memory isn't a finished product, it's a work in progress," et al. An entertaining fictional reflection on the 20th century's most famous magician that probably shouldn't be the first book one reads on the subject.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171846992
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/01/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

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