Fascist dreams

[Ya Sam]

I already posted about Leslie Epstein’s novel "The Eighth Wonder of the 
World". Here is another review:

"Leslie Epstein opens his panoramic new novel with a cast of thousands 
assembled to watch the conquered Ethiopians paraded through Rome. The 
procession of captured men and animals — elephants, lions, and camels — 
marches under the arch of Titus, which was built to commemorate the conquest 
of Jerusalem by the very Jews vanquished in that ancient war. The crowd is 
“singing and chanting and roaring.” On the dais sits Pope Pius, fingering 
the “tortured body” on the crucifix around his neck, watching nervously. And 
Mussolini in his familiar posture, strutting and puffing, stands above the 
crowd while women weep and offer themselves and their children up to him.

Epstein repeatedly summons a cinematic vision to produce the brand of 
spectacle that Fascism inspired. The result is a sweeping, operatic work, 
its many narratives linked by Hollywood-scale production numbers 
choreographed by his verbal pyrotechnics. But the formidable task of 
knotting together a work that, like Pound’s Cantos or Pynchon’s novels, 
encompasses just about everything is such that even a writer with Epstein’s 
control cannot keep his book from at times dissolving into a histrionic 
pageant."
.....


http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid26286.aspx

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