- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber; New edition edition (20 Aug 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 057120905X
- ISBN-13: 978-0571209057
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.2 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 454,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
In the final days of the Second World War, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley scrawls his desperate account on the walls and ceilings of his ice-cold prison high in the Austrian Alps. Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament - the sordid truth that he alone possessed. Fascinated but horrified, they learn of a dazzling array of characters caught up in a scandal and political corruption.
Famous Last Words is part-thriller, part-horror story; it is also a meditation on history and the human soul and it is Findley's fine achievement that he has combined these elements into a web that constantly surprises and astounds the reader.
About the Author
Timothy Findley was born in Toronto in 1930. His first career was in the theatre; he was a charter company member of Ontario's Stratford Shakespearean Festival in 1953, and toured several European capitals.$$$In 1963, Findley turned to writing full-time and in 1977 his third novel, The Wars, won a Governor General's Award. It is now considered a Canadian classic. Following his bestsellers such as Famous Last Words, he won an Edgar Award for The Telling of Lies, while his collection of short stories, Stones, won Ontario's Trillium Award.$$$Findley's first work of non-fiction, Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer's Workbook, made him the first two-time winner of a Canadian Authors Association Award; he had earlier won its fiction counterpart for his novel, Not Wanted on the Voyage. He has also written plays, and his third, The Stillborn Lover (1993), won the CAA Drama Award, as well as winning an Arthur Ellis Award and Chalmers Award. His later novels include Headhunter (1993) and The Piano Man's Daughter (1995). His most recent play, Elizabeth Rex, was produced at the 2000 Stratford Festival in Canada.$$$Along with the likes of Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley has become one of Canada's most acclaimed and best-selling authors. In 2000, Faber published Pilgrim and reissued The Wars and Famous Last Words. His last novel, Spadework, was published in 2002, the year in which Timothy Findley died.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Dead frozen and misfigured, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is discovered, in the Grand Elysium Hotel up in the Austrian Alps by officers of the American army, in the last days of the Second World War. Scrawled over the walls of four rooms is his testament relating a story of ambition, corruption, conspiracy and failure set against a backdrop of war and death.
Whose history, whose story survives? In an elegant, precise, gripping prose, Timothy Findley addresses this central postmodernist question using well known historical characters within the context of a past accessible to us only through texts. "All I have written here is true. Except the lies", Mauberley writes on the wall. By playing upon the truth and lies of historical records and by using false "historical facts", Findley comments on the ficitional character of recorded history, the failure of memory, the impossibility of truth, the inaccessibility of the reality of the past: "No one can be made to state it was absolutely thus and so. Nothing can be conjured of its size. In the end the sighting is rejected, becoming something only dimly thought on: dreadful but unreal".
Were Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor ever involved in a plot called Penelope? (No, despite the evidence presented) Did Mauberley ever meet Ezra Pound? (Yes and no, he is a fictional character of one Pound's poems). The reader is constantly faced with the blurred borders between real and fictitious as the meaning-creating narrative prose of Mauberley is faced with the brutal events of the past.
Famous Last Words is an ingenious novel that moves between the historical and the literary and the fictitiousness of both.
Whose history, whose story survives? In an elegant, precise, gripping prose, Timothy Findley addresses this central postmodernist question using well known historical characters within the context of a past accessible to us only through texts. "All I have written here is true. Except the lies", Mauberley writes on the wall. By playing upon the truth and lies of historical records and by using false "historical facts", Findley comments on the ficitional character of recorded history, the failure of memory, the impossibility of truth, the inaccessibility of the reality of the past: "No one can be made to state it was absolutely thus and so. Nothing can be conjured of its size. In the end the sighting is rejected, becoming something only dimly thought on: dreadful but unreal".
Were Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor ever involved in a plot called Penelope? (No, despite the evidence presented) Did Mauberley ever meet Ezra Pound? (Yes and no, he is a fictional character of one Pound's poems). The reader is constantly faced with the blurred borders between real and fictitious as the meaning-creating narrative prose of Mauberley is faced with the brutal events of the past.
Famous Last Words is an ingenious novel that moves between the historical and the literary and the fictitiousness of both.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's always exciting to find a new author and realise that there's a whole body of work out there to enjoy. Why on earth have we been deprived of Timothy Findley in Britain for so long? This novel was first published in Canada in the 80s, and "The Wars" in the 70s.
The main narrator of "Famous Last Words" is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and that conceit sets the tone - a profound and deep book which still plays with the reader teasingly. On one level, it is a wise, gripping and shocking analysis of the relationship of Mrs Simpson & the King - twining the greatest love-story of the 20th century in with the great evils of Nazism and war. But there is much more to it: reminds me of Eco at his best, e.g "Foucault's Pendulum".
AND - it's written literately in the past tense - a rare virtue these days!
The main narrator of "Famous Last Words" is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and that conceit sets the tone - a profound and deep book which still plays with the reader teasingly. On one level, it is a wise, gripping and shocking analysis of the relationship of Mrs Simpson & the King - twining the greatest love-story of the 20th century in with the great evils of Nazism and war. But there is much more to it: reminds me of Eco at his best, e.g "Foucault's Pendulum".
AND - it's written literately in the past tense - a rare virtue these days!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
One of the most important books in Canadian Literature
21 Jun 1996
Format:Hardcover
Crisply written, suspensfull, and with a cast from the pages of 20th centuary history,
"Famous Last Words" is a towering achievement in storytelling.
Set in World War II, the novel follows the exploits of writer Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, a character Findlay has drawn from the
poems of one of this novels secondary characters, Ezra Pound. Yes, That's right, I said secondary characters. The novel,
which examines the curious attraction of Germany to all symbols English spends much more time on the comings and goings of some other
pretty important folk, like German Foriegn Minister Von Ribbentrop, or the real murdered British diplomat Sir Harry Oakes.
Looming large throughout the novel, is the character of the Duchess of Windsor, known forever as Mrs. Simpson.
"Famous Last Words" tells of Mauberly's romantic obsession with Mrs. Simpson. It also proposes the shocking theory that the Nazi's
under Hitler had a unique and unhealthy obsession of its own involving Mrs Simpson and her brurned out hulk of a former king,
Edward VIII.
Along the way, Findlay masterfully weaves real history with gripping fiction making for a book that facsinates and teaches.
Withn "Famous Last Words" Findlay takes his place amoung the best of his countrymen, including fellow Canadians, Robertson Davis
and Margaret Atwood.
"Famous Last Words" is a towering achievement in storytelling.
Set in World War II, the novel follows the exploits of writer Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, a character Findlay has drawn from the
poems of one of this novels secondary characters, Ezra Pound. Yes, That's right, I said secondary characters. The novel,
which examines the curious attraction of Germany to all symbols English spends much more time on the comings and goings of some other
pretty important folk, like German Foriegn Minister Von Ribbentrop, or the real murdered British diplomat Sir Harry Oakes.
Looming large throughout the novel, is the character of the Duchess of Windsor, known forever as Mrs. Simpson.
"Famous Last Words" tells of Mauberly's romantic obsession with Mrs. Simpson. It also proposes the shocking theory that the Nazi's
under Hitler had a unique and unhealthy obsession of its own involving Mrs Simpson and her brurned out hulk of a former king,
Edward VIII.
Along the way, Findlay masterfully weaves real history with gripping fiction making for a book that facsinates and teaches.
Withn "Famous Last Words" Findlay takes his place amoung the best of his countrymen, including fellow Canadians, Robertson Davis
and Margaret Atwood.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
The Electric Moment
15 May 2003
Format:Hardcover
To begin with, every reader of this book should first read the poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" by Ezra Pound, since this fictional persona of Pound's ends up being the central character of this fascinating book. The book works mainly on two levels: 1.) That of the intrigues, relationships and a certain "cabal" surrounding the rise of the Fascists and Nazis to power and their eventual defeat, all plausible (I did some research), and historically based, which makes the book the page-turner that it is. 2.) The embedded questionings of human motivations and actions and meditation-provoking sections futher calling into question what ultimately comprises history.
This second aspect is what makes the book more than just your average historical thriller. Findley has a fine manner of putting events into a poetic, philosophical cast. - But the book meanders a bit much, and somehow lacks a certain panache and poetic/philosophical heft that detracts from its effectiveness- Perhaps this is inevitable in a book that weaves in and out of so many different intrigues, betrayals and deceptions while at the same time employing a prose style that is downright contemplative at times. In other words, the two levels don't quite seem to mesh as they should.
Aside from a little muddlednesss, however, this is a very fine piece of literature. It will having you turning the pages in excited bewilderment while at the same time pondering the questions it provokes about mankind and history.
There is an intriguing passage in the middle of Mauberly's narrative where he imagines a future historian, a "dread academic, much too careful of his research" who will completely botch things in his account of these times "because he will not acknowledge that history is made in the electric moment, and its flowering is all in chance....There is more in history of impulse than we dare to know."---So, can a "true" history be written after all? Or does a fictional account, such as this book containing a narrative written by a fictional character, have the famous last words?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A fantastic post-modern read
30 Aug 2005
Format:Paperback
Interesting that The Wars deals with the First World War and one man's personal transformation both before the war and during it. Famous Last Words, in a sense, picks up where the other novel left off. While the author's fictional protagonist/antagonist Mauberly is the inadvertent co-narrator of the story, the novel really focuses on varying characters and motives both during and after the Second World War.
The most intriguing part of this novel is the discovery of Mauberly's writings on the walls of a European hotel room and the impending decisions to be made about its historical importance. American soldiers have to decide whether to preserve the historical narrative written by a questionable character or destroy all memory--artistic or otherwise--of a gruesome war.
One gets the sense that Findley is making a post-modern comment on the myth of truth-telling and the conflict between art and politics. But also, the irony of Findlay as storyteller commenting on the subjectivity of storytelling is not lost.
All the Findlay elements are here in this novel: intrigue, mystery, psycho-analysis, and moral ambiguity. It does not have the power or punch of The Wars, but it is a confusingly fascinating read.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
