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Seven Lies by: James Lasdun List Price: £7.99 City Travel Guides Price: £5.99 You Save: £2.00 (25%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback EAN: 9780099483687 ISBN: 0099483688 Label: Vintage Manufacturer: Vintage Number Of Pages: 208 Publication Date: February 01, 2007 Publisher: Vintage Studio: Vintage Sales Rank: 140497 Related Items: Related Items:      see moreBrowse for similar items by category:
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 Rating: - Thought-provoking page turnerThis is a short book which I got through in one day. The writing style is direct and arresting, and the drama begins on page one. The story which unfolds is of a young man's growing up in East Germany, his passions, ambitions, and plottings. At the start of the story we find him at a party in the US, a few years after the fall of communist régime in Eastern Europe. As the book progresses he recounts a series of incidents from his former life which explain what has brought him to where he is now. I did not realise how literally the reader should understand the title of the book. Each chapter reveals a further treachery. Some forced on the characters by the political system they are forced to live under, but others ... Read More: Rating: - Ripley Goes EastThere is something compelling and yet repulsive about hero Stefan Vogel in Lasdun's latest novel. Unlike the self deluding Miller in the previous (and wonderful) Horned Man, Vogel is calculating, sly and manipulative but retains the sympathy of the reader nonetheless through his honesty, vulnerability and sheer audacity. Vogel builds a false edifice around himself built on lies (more than seven i think), compounding layer upon layer of untruth, bluff and misunderstanding. We squirm with shared embarrassment, watch his delicate web wobble as Stefan is almost exposed as a fraud in a claustrophobic East Germany itself struggling to maintain its communist principles and ideals when the foundations of society are crumbling in the face of western capitalist ... Read More: Rating: - The Scorned ManJames Lasdun's new novel is less eccentric than his first, The Horned Man, but all the more seductive for it. Stefan Vogel, immigrant from the former East Germany to the USA, begins his diary with an account of how a woman threw a glass of wine over him at a party. (Yes, that's not blood on the front cover...) The event is recounted, or recalled, several times by him over the following pages, sometimes briefly "Are you Stefan Vogel? Yes. Splash!" and sometimes with all his poet's tools to the fore "And out of the points of light gleaming about her, the goblet of red wine, which I have not previously noticed, detaches itself, coming perplexingly towards me, in a perplexingly violent manner, its ruby hemisphere exploding ... Read More: Rating: - From the DDR With LoveI can't believe I am the first reader to review Seven Lies. I began reading the novel out of curiosity: I have been to Berlin several times and I have read many studies of the DDR (The East German Republic). Lasdun's East Germany is absolutely convincing: he seems to know its society as well as he knows New York, where he has lived for several years. Seven Lies is more than a story about East Germany seen from America after the fall of the Wall. The novel isn't just a portrait of a citizen corrupted by the duplicitous country in which he lives, or a man disappointed that his new nation can not save him from his own distortions and the deceptions to himself and those who he loves. The narration takes audacious leaps which draw in the reader: after I read the ending ... Read More: Rating: - The Scorned ManJames Lasdun's new novel is less eccentric than his first, The Horned Man, but all the more seductive for it. Stefan Vogel, immigrant from the former East Germany to the USA, begins his diary with an account of how a woman threw a glass of wine over him at a party. The event is recounted, or recalled, several times by him over the following pages, sometimes briefly "Are you Stefan Vogel? Yes. Splash!" and sometimes with all his poet's tools to the fore "And out of the points of light gleaming about her, the goblet of red wine, which I have not previously noticed, detaches itself, coming perplexingly towards me, in a perplexingly violent manner, its ruby hemisphere exploding from the glass into elongated fingers like those of ... Read More: |
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