Un homme d'une cinquantaine d'années se penche sur son passé. Il évoque « sa propre honte d'être en vie ». Il vit avec la blessure d'une enfance polonaise passée dans la peur, le mensonge, le secret, au temps où les nazis et les complices semaient la haine, entre 1939 et 1945....
Sa mère morte en couches, son père médecin prisonnier des Soviétiques, Maciek, petit garçon juif, est recueilli et caché par sa tante Tania. Insolente et belle, jeune et dotée du « regard » qui l'aide à passer pour une bonne catholique, Tania osera tout pour le sauver. Contraints à un extraordinaire jeu de pistes, Maciek et la jeune femme échapperont au ghetto, à Varsovie en flamme, aux wagons d'Auschwitz, aux bourreaux allemands, aux délateurs polonais. Au final, le petit Maciek aura appris à mentir pour survivre. Il n'oubliera pas que la vérité signifie parfois la mort.
Une odyssée coupée de tableaux nostalgiques et de scènes effroyables. Un destin qui n'épuise pas la lancinante question posée par l'auteur : « où réside le sens de la survie ? ».
Une éducation polonaise, premier roman de Louis Begley, traduit dans de nombreux pays, a obtenu le prix Hemingway du Pen Club américain et celui de l'Irish Times Aer Lingus en Irlande, ainsi que le prix Médicis étranger en France en 1992.
"Jack Dana is a star history student at Yale with a bright career in academia ahead of him. But after 9/11 he feels it is his duty to change course. As a Marine infantry officer he is deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Severely wounded in combat, he begins writing a novel about his wartime experiences while surgeons at the Walter Reed Hospital patch up his pelvis. Jack then moves to Manhattan to live with his Uncle Harry, a partner in a leading New York law firm and Jack's surrogate father. With Harry's help he quickly finds a publisher, and the book's swift success launches Jack as a professional writer. After a second successful publication, Jack feels entitled to a vacation and leaves for a three-month trip to South America. The isolation from modern life on a ranch in western Brazil suits him perfectly, but on his way back home he looks at his emails and finds shocking news: his Uncle Harry is dead, hanged in his Sag Harbor summer home, clearly a suicide. Horrified and incredulous, Jack digs into the facts surrounding his uncle's death. Aided by Harry's most trusted associate, Kerry Black, with whom Jack falls in love, and by his college friend Scott Prentice who now works for the CIA, Jack discovers that Harry had pierced the secret of his most important client, Abner Brown, a rightwing multibillionaire notorious for backing extremist causes: Alongside his legitimate businesses, Brown owns and operates parallel criminal enterprises. The stakes and dangers are huge. Harry's death now seems anything but a suicide. And in order to avenge his uncle, Jack might have to circumvent the law and take matters into his own hands"--
Thomas Mistler has always thought himself "a happy man, as the world goes." A scion of old money, he made his own fortune in advertising and is now poised to sell the company he founded for a fabulous price. But when a medical examination reveals the presence in his liver of a fatal intruder, "preposterously, unmistakably, he begins to rejoice," with a feeling of having been set free. But free from what?He will seek the answer surreptitiously, without revealing his illness to his family, during a last reprieve, a moment of grace in "the one place on earth where nothing irritates him." But amidst the surreal beauties of Venice, he finds bitterness and chaos as he allows himself to drift for the first time. His halfhearted efforts to seize the day and its present pleasuresfirst with a striving young photographer and later with a love of his youth who never loved himcannot compete with his need to commune with the living and the dead that crowd his life: his father and uncle, pillars of the Establishment, sources of the "genetic puritanism" he has never tried to resist; his son, Sam, whose love he has only barely salvaged; his wife, once perfectly "beautiful and suitable," now humiliated by him and halfscorned. And the one woman who embodies everything he might have wished for, a woman he "never had and never lost."Deeply poignant yet mordantly funny, Mistler's Exit brilliantly discloses the pleasures and miseries of having it all. A masterly revelation f the complexities of the heart.From the Hardcover edition.
Qu'ont-ils à cacher, ces trois garçons qui, entrant à Harvard au tournant des années 1950, vont partager le même appartement ? Henry, qui joue un peu à n'être pas juif, est le plus doué. Il fascine Archie (mais qu'est-ce que celui-ci veut noyer dans l'alcool ?) et devient le meilleur ami du narrateur, Sam, qui, lui, a fort à faire pour qu'on le croie " normal ". Archie y perdra la vie ; Sam y gagnera une oeuvre et une renommée littéraire ; Henry, devenu un brillant avocat international, jouera un fameux tour aux socialistes lors des nationalisations de 1981. Pourtant, lui aussi " disparaîtra ". Jusqu'à ce que le fidèle Sam le retrouve là où l'on ne l'attendait pas... Louis Begley revient en force avec un grand roman qui chevauche les deux rives de l'Atlantique et entretient le suspense jusqu'à la dernière page.
Albert Schmidt, a retired lawyer, copes with the boredom of retirement, the devastating loss of his wife, and his Ivy League daughter's new fiance, until an unexpected new love brings the promise of a new life.
"Extraordinary...Rich in irony and regret...[the] people and settings are vividly realized and his prose [is] compelling in its simplicity."
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
As the world slips into the throes of war in 1939, young Maciek's once closetted existence outside Warsaw is no more. When Warsaw falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to secure their temporary lives--as the insistent drum of the Nazi march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.
At Harvard in the early 1950s, three mismatched freshmen are thrown together as roommates--Sam, an aristocratic Yankee; Archie, an affable Army brat; and Henry, a Polish refugee--in the story of their college years and their unique friendship.
A mesmerizing novel of deception and betrayal from the acclaimed author of Wartime Lies and About Schmidt.John North, a prizewinning American writer, is suddenly beset by dark suspicions about the real value of his work. Over endless hours and bottles of whiskey consumed in a mysterious cafyes'>#233; called Lyes'>#8217;Entre Deux Mondes, he recounts, in counterpoint to his doubts, the one story he has never told before, perhaps the only important one he will ever tell. Northyes'>#8217;s chosen interlocutoryes'>#8211;who could be his doppelgyes'>#228;ngeryes'>#8211;is transfixed by the revelations and becomes the narrator of Northyes'>#8217;s tale. North has always been faithful to his wife, Lydia, but when one of his novels achieves a special success, he allows himself a dalliance with Lyes'>#233;a, a starstruck young journalist. Coolly planning to make sure that his life with Lydia will not be disturbed, North is taken off guard when Lyes'>#233;a becomes obsessed with him and he with her elaborate erotic games. As the hypnotic and serpentine confession unfurls, we gradually discover the extraordinary lengths to which North has gone to indulge a powerful desire for selfdestruction. Shipwreck is a daring parable of the contradictory impulses that can rend a single soulyes'>#8211;narcissism and selfloathing, refinement and lust.From the Hardcover edition.
When we last saw Albert Schmidt Esq. («Schmidtie» to all near and dear), he had been expelled from paradise: his love Carrie, the Puerto Rican waitress forty years his junior, had taken up with a blond giant nearer her age and possibly the father of her baby-assuming it isn't Schmidt. Meanwhile, his only confirmed child, Charlotte, had proposed a truce in their perennially strained relations, which Schmidt accepted, despite its obliging him to resume dealings with her repulsive husband and her mother-in-law-cum-psychiatrist, whose life's work has been turning Charlotte decisively against Schmidt.
Reconnecting with a vibrant woman from his past, Philip is shocked to learn that her seemingly charmed marriage ended in divorce and tragedy and that the woman regarded her ex as a monster, a revelation that compels him to investigate the truth.
"A fine new novel... The great pleasure of reading Louis Begley [is] his exceptional literary intelligence." The New York Times Book Review "Begley again demonstrates that he can reveal the complexities of society and personality with a clear eye and graceful style... Morethan meets the requirements of graceful fiction." Time Proud, traditional, and impeccably organized, Albert Schmidt is a button-down lawyer of the old school. But now, after years of carefulmanagement, his life is slowly unraveling. His beloved wife has recently died. He stumbles--or is he being pushed?--into earlyretirement. And his daughter, his only child, is planning to marry a man Schmidt cannot approve of, for reasons he can scarcely admit, even to himself. As Schmidt gropes for resolutions, he finds unexpected hope in an intense passion that comes out of the blue. Set in the Hamptons and Manhattan, infused with black humor and startling eroticism, About Schmidt is both a meditation on lonelinessand on the power of romance to unlock the most impenetrable recesses of the heart. "Comical, tough, unsparing; it is as if Louis Auchincloss had exchanged the kid gloves for brass knuckles... Interesting and nervy." The Washington Post Book World "A powerful story of a man's fall from grace... The Remains of the Day come[s] to mind." Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Stunning." Los Angeles Times Book Review
Lucy De Bourgh, fille d'une des familles les plus en vue de Rhode Island, épouse dans les années 1950 Thomas Snow, fils d'un garagiste alors en pleine ascension sociale grâce à sa réussite foudroyante dans les affaires. Bien des années plus tard, Philip, veuf maintenant âgé, croise par hasard Lucy qu'il a autrefois fréquentée. Elle lui dévoile les détails saisissants de son mariage raté avec le « monstre » et Philip peine à concilier avec ses propres souvenirs ce flot inattendu d'amertume et de ressentiments qui remet en cause tout ce qu'il a pu imaginer jusqu'ici sur ces gens qu'il a connus, admirés ou encore désirés. Entre Paris et Manhattan, Long Island et Newport, Louis Begley pose un regard acéré sur les classes sociales aisées dans un roman intimiste au style élégant.
