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The Liar

The Liar

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The moral, if there is one, is that it's okay to live life in any way you want to, so long as you remember there isn't anyone to save you or fix you but yourself. Ik lees Het Nijlpaard van Stephen Fry. IN VERTALING. De omvang van deze ramp dringt slechts langzaamaan tot mij door. Het betekent dat ik nooit, NOOIT meer deze orgie van schuttingtaal, grotesk cynisme en platte seks, deze in vitriool, drijfmest en tien jaar oude whisky gedrenkte bladzijden voor de volle 100% zal kunnen smaken in de oorspronkelijke taal. Ik moet onmiddellijk stoppen met lezen tot ik een Engelse versie heb. MAAR IK KAN NIET STOPPEN!

Later, Adrian, the liar, a cheat when opportunity provides, and now a delightfully suave charmer of boys and girls alike, finds his match at Cambridge in his senior tutor, the ebullient Professor Donald Trefusis who, bored with Adrian’s plagiarism, tasks him to create “a piece of work that contains even the seed of novelty, the ghost of a shred of scintilla of a germ of a suspicion of an iota of a shadow of a particle of something interesting and provoking, something that will amuse and astonish”. If Adrian can turn in one original idea, Trefusis will let Adrian off the hook for any further work. A challenge he can’t resist, Adrian ropes in his nearest and dearest, much like his escapades at private school, to complete his scheme. While their mentor/mentee relationship with its transgenerational bromance is a bit cliché, what unfolds is is an amusing and fortuitous tale in which Adrian presents his thesis of sorts and Trefusis grooms his protégé. The Liar will be only the second of Fry's four novels to be filmed. The previous, 1994's The Hippopotamus, was released in 2017. The book is noted [ weaselwords] for its wit and humour, as well as its often outrageous references to various homosexual experiences. I did fear that re-reading it might destroy my loving memories, but I needn’t have worried. I still felt connected with the sections I had remembered so fondly, and in fact, probably had an even greater appreciation for Stephen Fry’s skills with the pen.Producers describe the film as "a fast-paced, rude, dark and very funny comedy about learning to accept who you are in life". Is it dirty? Absolutely. Is the protagonist an egotistical, whiskey-soaked, misogynist? Absolutely. Remember...this is a work of fiction and try not to get all uppity about some cursing and lewd language. Don't forget that some of the best, and now, most respected works of art, literature, music and theater were considered base, vile, subversive and, dare I say it, sacrilegious in their own days and have come to be regarded as classics and mainstays of our modern times. Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

It did, however, made me laugh, and I think I learned a few new words from it. Not words I'd dare to use in any company though, simply because they would be darned hard to inject into a conversation, and because I would probably use them in the wrong context anyway. But still, it was quite nice to read a book with fancy words for a change. Or, uh, I mean, a book with fancy words that were there for a reason other than "look what I can do!" There's no great character arc, which I also love. There's a believable one. He's had a life-changing experience, but he's also set in his ways. He's a better man.

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Indeed, so adept is he at so many things that Clive Anderson has even suggested that Fry would be able to turn his hand to football management. One can have no doubt that he would succeed. Stephen Fry is the epitome of the Renaissance Man and is fast becoming what we in Britain like to describe as a ‘national treasure.’ Possessed with a brilliant mind, a natural wit and an extraordinary verbal facility, Fry can never be ignored; he demands to be listened to, read and admired.

I wasn't sure what to make of this to begin with, but I found it increasingly brilliant as I went along. This book was a total mess spanning more than one timeline, without making you feel as if you realized that, because you didn’t, or you did too late. And you realized too late that the idea behind it is much farther than the humour and the ‘game’. I tell you, this book is a chronic liar too. All the possibly psychological analysis aside, The Liar is a racing novel of thrilling heroics, less-than-tender romantic encounters, and staggeringly fabulous Wildian wit. Wodehouse could not have written this, however. Not enough fun, and too much sex. Including all sorts of odd couplings, some of which are uncomfortable to think about.On that note, I agree with another reviewer in here that Stephen Fry could read aloud an IKEA instruction manual and I would probably still be enthralled. His language often strikes me as so much verbal bravado, underlined by his English public school pronunciation in the audio version, yet he can get away with it; in fact, I suppose that is his style, really. And it’s not just words. There are hundreds of facts, opinions and questions, all idiosyncratically Fry-esque, squeezed into the dialogue that I almost had to push the stop button a few times simply to digest something before moving on (just as I had to stop it once in a while when I didn’t catch what he was saying because I had started laughing). Each chapter weaves together a series of lies and truths which leave the reader guessing what is true and what is orchestrated until the pieces are slowly pulled loose. Are Adrian’s tastes really so catholic? Who murdered the Hungarian violinist? (And why was Adrian a witness?) What disentangles is a plot ripe with murder, intrigue, rivalry—all manhandled by a pot of unreliable narrators.

If you think that there is a discrepancy between giving a book 3 stars and placing it on the "disappointing" shelf, remember that the author is Stephen Fry, someone I think of as being awesomely smart and very funny. His intelligence is evident in this book, but much of the attempted humor falls flat. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that much of it is the kind of humor that might have flown a generation ago (think Kingsley Amis, Wilt Sharpe, Roald Dahl), but is completely jarring in 2010. What puzzles me is that it would have been equally jarring in 1994, when this book was published, and Fry is smart enough to know this, so it's obviously a conscious choice that he made. It's unclear why he did so, because it detracts quite a bit from the enjoyment of the book. It's a toss-up which was more offputting - the incessant vulgar misogynistic musings of the splenetic, Kingsley Amis wannabe narrator or the paragraphs of ridiculously mincing poofter-talk inflicted on the reader. There is really no excuse for this:

The Liar" has one weakness and that is the spy / espionage subplot that Fry inserts in brief chapters between the longer chapters that depict the linear narrative of the story. They are set off by italics until the subplot and main plot connect up, and I thought that it was a detraction from the text, weakened it almost like Fry did not trust the characters he had created on their own merits, but rather had to make them interesting by inserting them into a spy thriller novel. It was not necessary in my opinion. The novel is semi-autobiographical and many scenes echo experiences later recounted in Fry's memoir, Moab is My Washpot. [1] The character Trefusis was created by Fry for several humorous radio broadcasts on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends. Stephen Fry ranks among my favourite persons on earth. There's something about his terribly English combination of wit, erudition and a dirty mind that never fails to delight me, and it shines brightly in The Liar, the first of the four novels he has published so far. An irreverent and intelligent take on such British institutions as the public-school novel, the Cambridge novel and the spy novel, it is best appreciated by people who have an affinity for such things, but really, anyone with a taste for British humour should enjoy it. It's basically a late-twentieth-century P.G. Wodehouse update with some smut thrown in for good measure, and if that doesn't appeal to you, you're not a proper Anglophile. Weird, but compelling, because the main character, poet Edward Lennox Wallace (Tedward), is a cantankerous, misogynistic, drunken snob who becomes the unlikely investigator of a country house mystery.



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