Harlot's Ghost

Fülszöveg

Harlot's Ghost is the növel for which Norman Mailer has been searching throughout his long and brilliant career, the culmination of one of America's great literary journeys, a növel to fulflll Mailer's lifelong obsession with the mystery of America. Harlot's Ghost is a book about spies and intelligence officers - men and women for whom deceit and the invention of alternate selves become an honorable calling, a way of life, a kind of religion. But Harlot's Ghost is not a spy növel in which the forces of light struggle with those of darkness. The enemy here is not the alien and destructive will of a distant power, but the soulconsuming cold war itself. Harlot's Ghost is the story of a crusade, one in which the distinction between truth and falsehood is as elusive as the line between fiction and fact. Harry Hubbard, Mailer's narrator, happens to be an accomplished storyteller, but in no other way is he a particularly remarkable man. The son of an OSS hero, he is alsó the protégé of the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Harlot's Ghost is the növel for which Norman Mailer has been searching throughout his long and brilliant career, the culmination of one of America's great literary journeys, a növel to fulflll Mailer's lifelong obsession with the mystery of America. Harlot's Ghost is a book about spies and intelligence officers - men and women for whom deceit and the invention of alternate selves become an honorable calling, a way of life, a kind of religion. But Harlot's Ghost is not a spy növel in which the forces of light struggle with those of darkness. The enemy here is not the alien and destructive will of a distant power, but the soulconsuming cold war itself. Harlot's Ghost is the story of a crusade, one in which the distinction between truth and falsehood is as elusive as the line between fiction and fact. Harry Hubbard, Mailer's narrator, happens to be an accomplished storyteller, but in no other way is he a particularly remarkable man. The son of an OSS hero, he is alsó the protégé of the legendary Hugh Tremont Montague, whose nom de guerre is Harlot. Harry Hubbard s story of his own development as an intelligence officer and of Harlot's far more spectacular adventures in duplicity is alsó the story of the CIA, which represents, in Mailer's hands, America's postwar church: the keeper of its secrets, the vector of its values. Montague, alias Harlot, is himself a holy innocent in pursuit of a monumental dream, a man so transformed by a life of subterfiige and delusion that his real motives may by now be beyond even his own comprehension. Born in a western state, the product of a tragically alienated childhood, a graduate of Harvard, a former Episcopal schoolmaster, Harlot appoints himself defender of the American faith and becomes a master manipulator at work in the interstice of (continued on back\flap) Vissza