- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Classics (4 Jan 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0141188693
- ISBN-13: 978-0141188690
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 44,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Poland, 1939. The comfortable, secure world of assimilated Jews is blown away by the invasion of the Third Reich. Maciek's father disappears into the war's vortex, leaving the orphaned child with his acerbic and beautiful Aunt Tania. It is her cool inventiveness, in their dramatic flight through a landscape of oppression, that will ensure their fragile survival.
About the Author
Louis Begley was born in 1933 in Poland. Among his novels are Wartime Lies (1991), About Schmidt (1996), Mistler's Exit (1998), Schmidt Delivered (2000), Shipwreck (2003). He has received the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Fiction Award, the Irish Times - Aer Lingus Book Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger (all for Wartime Lies), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He lives in New York.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a most incredibly beautiful, and at times, painful book: my own copy has been read countless times by myself, and by family visitors. The narrative, typical of those who have lived through great trauma, is very 'matter of fact', with the main characters drawing the reader into their rapidly changing lives, where life itself at times is dependant upon stylish quick-wits and intellect. The back drops of pre-war Polish life as enjoyed by a well-off Jewish family, who always thought themselves merely to be 'Polish', are tightly crafted adding to the poignancy of the coming years.
Format:Paperback
This short book is one you will read in a single setting and be passing on to friends afterward. Perhaps the best short novel set during the Second World War, its success is probably due to the combination of the author's own personal experience - transformed into fiction - and his ability to write so well. The novel is gripping and moving. Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost features Begley's mother as a character if you're interested in reading more.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
You know you're getting older when the Penguin Modern Classics start getting younger. Louis Begley's debut novel Wartime Lies was published in 1991, and yet here it is, getting a little silver in its spine already.
Begley is best known, if at all, for writing the novel on which the Alexander Payne/Jack Nicholson film About Schmidt was based, and clearly writes his own About the Author blurbs (details of his children's occupations, anyone?).
Wartime Lies is written by a man looking back at his childhood in Poland in the 1940s, and tells us his story as a boy ("not very different from my own life during that time," as Begley tells us in a 2004 Afterword). 1940s Poland means of course that this is a story of the Jewish experience of the Nazis, and Begley writes with clear-eyed lack of sentimentality. And yet one can't help feeling that there's something lacking when the boy, Maciek, doesn't much mourn his (probably permanent) separation from his family, when he and his aunt Tania flee to live undercover as the wife of a Polish doctor who has been imprisoned by the Russians.
And the story begins with a desperately obtuse opening chapter - testing our stamina, Begley, with your convoluted Classical references? - and continues for a time in a somewhat dull style. However it does pick up once Maciek and Tania are in hiding and on the run, and some vivid details stick out, like the brutality of the Lithuanian soldiers, and the brilliant escape which Tania effects from the trains to Auschwitz.
Nonetheless in a glut of fictionalised memoirs of this sort - from Primo Levi to Aharon Appelfeld - Wartime Lies doesn't stand out from the crowd. It's worth reading, but modern classic status is probably a few decades off just yet.
Begley is best known, if at all, for writing the novel on which the Alexander Payne/Jack Nicholson film About Schmidt was based, and clearly writes his own About the Author blurbs (details of his children's occupations, anyone?).
Wartime Lies is written by a man looking back at his childhood in Poland in the 1940s, and tells us his story as a boy ("not very different from my own life during that time," as Begley tells us in a 2004 Afterword). 1940s Poland means of course that this is a story of the Jewish experience of the Nazis, and Begley writes with clear-eyed lack of sentimentality. And yet one can't help feeling that there's something lacking when the boy, Maciek, doesn't much mourn his (probably permanent) separation from his family, when he and his aunt Tania flee to live undercover as the wife of a Polish doctor who has been imprisoned by the Russians.
And the story begins with a desperately obtuse opening chapter - testing our stamina, Begley, with your convoluted Classical references? - and continues for a time in a somewhat dull style. However it does pick up once Maciek and Tania are in hiding and on the run, and some vivid details stick out, like the brutality of the Lithuanian soldiers, and the brilliant escape which Tania effects from the trains to Auschwitz.
Nonetheless in a glut of fictionalised memoirs of this sort - from Primo Levi to Aharon Appelfeld - Wartime Lies doesn't stand out from the crowd. It's worth reading, but modern classic status is probably a few decades off just yet.
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