Word: wilson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Annie Wilson (Blanchett) is part psychic, part psychiatrist. The locals come to her modest Georgia home less for her readings of the future than for sympathy and counsel. Valerie the battered wife (Hilary Swank) needs to hear she has the courage to leave her brutal husband Donnie (Reeves). Poor afflicted Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi) needs to get those angry voices out of his head. And when prime rich bitch Jessica King (Katie Holmes) goes missing, her grieving fiance (Greg Kinnear) comes to Annie. For though she chats with her dead grandmother, sleeps with a baseball bat beside...
...definition of a literary thriller: a detective story with geopolitical ramifications. That, at least, is the formula followed with considerable, nail-biting skill in Robert Wilson's A Small Death in Lisbon (Harcourt; 440 pages; $25). The author constructs a murder mystery that cannot be solved without following a winding trail through a considerable and bloody swath of 20th century history...
Suddenly, Wilson's narrative jumps away from this unhappy family and back to 1941 Berlin, where an industrialist named Klaus Felsen is being persuaded, none too gently, to abandon his railroad-coupling factory and take on an important assignment for the Nazis. The Third Reich needs vast amounts of wolfram, i.e., tungsten, to use as an alloy in solid-core ammunition, essential for tank warfare, and the present supply from China will cease once Hitler breaks his nonaggression pact with Stalin. Portugal has wolfram, and Felsen speaks Portuguese, a memento from his past affair with a Brazilian woman. Ergo, Felsen...
From this point on, Wilson's novel careers along on two tracks--the present investigation in Lisbon and past Nazi activities in Portugal--that slowly but inexorably converge. Inspector Coelho, of course, knows nothing about Klaus Felsen or his murky role on behalf of the Nazis, so the reader is always several steps ahead of the fictional detective. But they are only baby steps, because the connection between Felsen's story and the murder of Catarina Oliveira remains tantalizingly unclear for much of the novel...
...fact, some thriller fans may feel that Wilson drags out the suspense a tad longer than is strictly necessary. But more patient readers will find plenty to divert them along the way. Coelho, for example, is not simply a plot functionary but an interesting and sympathetic character in his own right, a widower still grieving for his wife, killed a year earlier in a car accident, and uneasily trying to raise a daughter about the same age as the murder victim. And Wilson's descriptions often achieve epigrammatic power. Here is Felsen visiting bombed-out Berlin near...