Louis Begley Books In Order

Mistler’s Exit

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 pleasures first with a striving young photographer and later with a love of his youth who never loved him cannot 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 half scorned. 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 of the complexities of the heart.

Shipwreck

A mesmerizing novel of deception and betrayal from the acclaimed author of Wartime Lies and About Schmidt. John North, a prize winning 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 caf called L 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. North’s chosen interlocutor who could be his doppelg nger is transfixed by the revelations and becomes the narrator of North 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 L 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 L 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 self destruction. Shipwreck is a daring parable of the contradictory impulses that can rend a single soul narcissism and self loathing, refinement and lust. From the Hardcover edition.

Matters of Honor

Terrifically intelligent, moving, and entertaining.
The New York Sun

With snappy dialogue and intelligent prose…
Begley paints a memorable portrait of lasting friendship and of the strength required to step outside of the expectations that surround each of us.
Rocky Mountain News

At the beginning of the 1950s, three disparate young men are thrown together as roommates at Harvard College: Henry White, a Polish Jewish refugee who survived World War II by hiding in Poland; Archibald P. Palmer III, an Army brat; and Sam Standish, ostensibly the scion of a fine New England family who has just learned that he was adopted at birth by parents he cannot respect. Each seeks to come to terms with his identity or to remake it altogether. Henry’s task is especially daunting: He is determined to live as an American, free of the shackles of his hideous past. But reinvention is a bargain with the devil, and over the years each will find that it comes at a high cost, challenging one s honor and loyalty to parents, friends, and ultimately oneself.

Absorbing…
In full Henry James mode, Begley uses a lucid prose style to dispassionately eviscerate the upper clas*ses even as he illuminates the true meaning of friendship.
Booklist

The final moral crisis of Henry s life is gorgeously evoked…
. Begley s analysis of class and anti Semitism in America is often brilliant.
The Washington Post Book World

A moving tale…
Begley s technique demands attention and richly rewards it.
The New York Observer

An elegant novel of enduring friendship.
Publishers Weekly starred review

Venice for Lovers

Every year for the thirty they have been married, Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In Venice for Lovers, Begley and Muhlstein fashion their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay. In her contribution to the book, Muhlstein charmingly describes how she and her husband dine at the same restaurant every night for years on end, and how becoming friends with restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the city and its inhabitants, far from the tourists in San Marco Square. They meet Venetians like Ernesto, who tells them of the great flood that nearly destroyed the beautiful city; and Nerone, an authoritarian chef who serves the freshest seafood and throws yesterday’s catch to the cats. And they spend blissful hours at Da Fiore, named by the International Herald Tribune as one of the ten best restaurants in the world but which, unfazed, retains its rustic simplicity. In his short novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with and in Venice. His twenty year old protagonist, enamored with an older, far worldlier woman, is lured by her to the City of Water, only to be unceremoniously dumped after a brief rendezvous. But he discovers a lasting love for Venice itself not an uncommon romance, as Begley s brilliant essay on the city s place within world literature demonstrates. By turns humorous, nostalgic, and spellbinding, Venice for Lovers is a memorable collaboration by two fine stylists a very private view of a place that will forever inspire dreams of love and passion.

The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head

A new biography of Western literature’s most iconic writer, from the acclaimed novelist and author of About Schmidt.

Kafkaesque: the very word evokes tortuous bureaucracy, crushing self doubt, and an almost unbearable inadequacy in the face of higher powers. After Kafka, it can be said, literature was not the same. In the few novels and short stories he left behind, he distilled the horrors of the new age. Kafka’s is the voice of the outsider that is, the voice of each one of us at once defined by its affiliations and completely, utterly alone.

The product of both a transitional age the beginning of the 20th century and a territory in flux Czechoslovakia, Kafka spoke and wrote German in Czech territory. He was a Jew among Christians, a non observant Jew among believers. Louis Begley, himself a multilingual exile and, like Kafka, a lawyer and writer, renders Kafka’s life with sensitivity and insight. Begley’s discussion of Kafka’s masterpiece The Trial, along with shorter works such as ‘The Metamorphosis,’ opens a window on a tormented soul, one of the most intriguing figures of the modern period.

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court martialed for selling secrets to the German military attach in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another against nationalists, anti Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army s top brass in order to secure Dreyfus s conviction.

Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti Semitism? In Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honor.