Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Cabell County Public Library | F WEST, MORRIS L., 1916- | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Author Notes
Morris West was born in 1916 in St Kilda, Melbourne. At the age of thirteen, he left home to study with the Christian Brothers Order in Sydney, but left in 1939 after 12 years, before taking his final vows. He was fluent in Italian and French, and taught modern languages and mathematics in New South Wales and Tasmania in his twenties. He spent four years code-breaking as a cipher officer in the AIF, and then for a decade he concentrated on producing and writing radio plays.
West's first novel was published in 1945 and he began writing full time in the 1950s. He went to Italy were he went undercover with Father Mario Borelli, who was working with street urchins, and wrote The Children of the Sun, published in 1957. In 1959, following six months as Vatican correspondent for The Daily Mail, he published The Devil's Advocate, which won the William Heinemann Award of the Royal Society, the National Brotherhood Award of the National Council of Christians and Jews as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Award. Shoes of a Fisherman, the first of The Papal Series, which included The Clowns of God, Lazarus and Eminence, won the Best-Sellers Paperback of the Year Award in 1965.
West helped to found the Australian Society of Authors, was chairman of the National Book Council, chairman of the National Library of Australia and a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was made member of the order of Australia (MBE) in 1985 and officer of the order of Australia (AO) in 1997. Apart from writing novels, West also wrote screenplays, radio dramas, plays and was also an artist. Translated into twenty-seven languages, his works have sold more that sixty million copies. He also wrote an account on his spiritual journey, A View From the Ridge, published at the end of 1996.
Morris West died while working at his desk on 9th October 1999.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Carl Strassberger, the narrator of West's 26th novel, a psychological thriller, is erudite, quick-witted, acutely observantrather like his creator, one imagines, whose talent shows little sign of waning as he enters his 80th year. If Carl's storytelling is a welcome pleasure, however, the author's mission, for him, is not: he must track down his brother-in-law, Larry Lucas, who has disappeared after a series of intense negotiations, leaving behind his wife and children, as well as his directorship of the family banking business, Strassberger & Co., an affiliation that allows Carl to pursue the life of a wealthy artist. Carl discovers that Larry is a manic-depressive who may have endangered his life by engaging the services of an outfit, fronted by a travel agency, that promises to help anyone to vanish utterly into a new identity. Enlisting the aid of Strassberger & Co.'s security firm, Carl, traveling incognito, follows the trail to Italy and then Switzerland, where the tragic consequences of Larry's flight are manifested in a possible hostile takeover of the Strassberger corporation. The suspense occasionally wanders into melodrama, but West compensates with a series of empathetic characterizations that present Carl's artistic view of the world, as well as with an astute analysis of the dysfunctional family dynamic that contributed to Larry's disappearance. Moral wisdom and a mature appreciation of human ways and foibles hallmark this prime offering from a veteran. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Octogenarian West (The Lovers, 1993, etc.) shows that his veins still run with fictive silver as he returns to the problems of manic-depression he limned in his 1983 novel about Jung, The World is Made of Glass. West's 26th novel demonstrates his genius for detail: Each story-heavy page also carries engrossing (and relevant) arcana on the fine arts, high finance, and psychology. Genius financier Larry Lucas, who burns brightly but masks dark depths, vanishes, having pulled off a $5 billion deal for Strassberger & Company in New York. Married to the daughter of Emil Strassberger, his boss, and the father of two children, Larry suffers from a mood disorder and has chosen to quit the company and his marriage while at the peak of his career--entering what artists call the ``vanishing point'' in rendering perspective. Larry's artist brother-in-law Carl, meanwhile, is called home from his French village to seek out the lost Larry. The search carries Carl back to France and then on to Italy and Switzerland, as well as deep into the toils of international finance. Larry has surrendered his considerable fortune and his Strassberger bonds to a financier who funds a shady travel service that helps people disappear and start new lives. By the time Carl finally faces Larry at a Jungian hospital in Zurich, he has also faced a number of devious and violent characters, been duped and almost destroyed by a crushingly intelligent villain, and sampled a smorgasbord of sex and great cuisine in fabulous hotels along the way. Also enviable: West's photographic eye for scene-setting, buildings, and European landscape, not to mention human appearances. Only his whetstoned dialogue at times bulks up with space-saving, informational rather than dramatic cadences--but few will care. Amazing cultural grasp from a writer who seems to have been born knowing everything. (International author tour)
Booklist Review
Reasonably realistic characters acting in and reacting to compelling situations will ensure that West's well-established readership won't be too disappointed in his latest novel, despite the fact that it is not especially imaginative. Carl Strassberger is the only son of a prominent New York financier. Carl has forsaken corporate life and gone off to France to paint. His brother-in-law, groomed to take over the family business in lieu of Carl, disappears. Carl is asked by his father to put his artistic life on hold and search for the missing man. In tracking down his brother-in-law, Carl must assume a new identity and roam the international underground. Finding out what his brother-in-law has done with himself and why takes us through a plausible narrative to an ending that gives us and Carl the necessary closure. West's books always end up on the best-seller lists, and this one is sure to follow. (Reviewed May 1, 1996)0061010693Brad Hooper
Library Journal Review
In a competent but not outstanding offering from the best-selling author of The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), Carl Strassberger, the son of a well-known and financially secure New York banking family, is called back from his idyllic life as a painter in the south of France to hunt for his brother-in-law, who has gone missing after negotiating a multimillion-dollar banking deal. It becomes clear to Strassberger that Larry Lucas, who has left behind a wife and two children, had planned his disappearance for some time. Early in his investigation, Strassberger discovers that Lucas is a manic depressive, swinging wildly between dark thoughts of suicide and risky, "unbankerlike" behavior. As he digs deeper, Strassberger becomes involved with psychiatrists, a shady travel agent who specializes in helping clients disappear, and an investor with takeover plans for the Strassberger bank. Never as meaningful nor as insightful into the problems of manic depression as the author intends it to be, this book is still an appropriate purchase for libraries where West has a following.Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
