Doctor Criminale
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A headstrong young journalist goes on the adventure of a lifetime, traveling through Europe to find the world’s most enigmatic philosopher
Bazlo Criminale is one of Europe’s most legendary living men. A mysterious novelist and thinker known for his extreme elusiveness, the beloved Criminale is a cultural icon of the highest order. Seeking to find the man behind the myth, a London television-news station hires Francis Jay, an enterprising young reporter, to find Criminale. From Vienna to Budapest to the picturesque lakeshores of Italy, Jay journeys across the continent—and even briefly to Brazil—interviewing the man’s biographer, his publisher, and his former lover, all of whom have their own interests at stake. Through literary award dinners and other examples of “culture as spectacle,” Jay must navigate the chaotic world of post–Cold War Europe as he chases the specter of a literary legend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British novelist and critic Bradbury has a wicked satirical eye for academic and literary pretensions, and he has exercised it notably in such works as The History Man and Rates of Exchange. This time, although his eye is no less sharp, his target is altogether larger: nothing less than the role of the European intellectual at a time of the collapse of nations. national unrest. Hero Francis Jay is a trendy but basically decent ``journo''--a literary scribbler for London's Sunday papers. Inveigled by a rapacious girlfriend into researching a TV show about the mysterious Bazlo Criminale, a world-renowned philosopher who has dwelt with apparent ease on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, Jay sets off to find his man. By way of Vienna and Budapest, he runs Criminale to earth at a hilarious literary-political conference at an American millionaire's villa in North Italy and begins to observe him; by the time he has met and talked to him--and also met a former wife living in Argentina, bedded a former girlfriend and thought somewhat beyond his usual scope--Jay has decided that life, even the intellectual life, is both more serious and more perilous than his glib worldview has allowed for. So the novel is high comedy with a quite serious undertone, never less than brilliantly entertaining and written with considerable sophistication; Bradbury has even performed the difficult feat of creating a great philosopher who is as magnetic on the page as he is said to be in life.
