Word: findley
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FAMOUS LAST WORDS by Timothy Findley Delacorte; 396 pages...
...begins Canadian Timothy Findley's fourth and most peculiar novel. In Ragtime style. Famous Last Words assembles a vivid cast of historical personages, among them the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Lana Turner, Ernest Hemingway and Charles Lindbergh. But here the famous names do not move to syncopated jazz; instead the work resounds with tainted anthems...
...hero himself is a double fiction: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was the most famous of Pound's poetic creations, a British reactionary born in a savage half-century, "out of date with his time." Findley's Mauberley rushes to catch up with his century. Cowering in a crumbling Alpine hotel that has seen grander times and better people, he writes a graffiti testament in rooms once occupied by the likes of Isadora Duncan and Somerset Maugham. He has barely finished when someone stabs him. The body and the writing are found by American soldiers, liberators of the death camps...
...Findley's reweaving of history is so canny that it is sometimes difficult to tell where the tear ends and the mend begins. The duke, for instance, did visit Germany in 1937, where he took tea with Field Marshal Goring and was photographed with Hitler. And he did lounge in neutral Portugal, as if to wait out the hostilities, until Winston Churchill learned of a Nazi kidnap plot and ordered British troops to provide an escort to the Bahamas. But the additional malice is pure Findley: British commandos raid the duke's quarters, only to find the royal...
...accuser in this case is another Illinois Republican, Rep. Paul Findley, who has just written a book about Lincoln's years in Congress. He discovered the details of Lincoln's padded expense account in muckraking stories written at the time by Horace ("Go West, young man!") Greeley of the New York Tribune. Findley is less than outraged by Honest Abe's exaggerations. He points out that the future President only earned $4 a day for his service in the House...